Document Type

Book

Publication Date

2026

Abstract

What was literary naturalism? One might be tempted to say it was an experiment in fiction (at least in Europe), eventually absorbed into its more successful sibling, Realism. Or one might argue it was a seminal movement which has been misunderstood and read reductively as depicting humans as passive pawns in an indifferent world. Beyond this obstacle of perceived one-dimensionality, there is the less obvious but equally challenging charge that naturalism was, at bottom, a propagandistic genre, appropriating, as Keith Newlin suggests, melodrama for the purpose of persuading readers to "redress social imbalance" ( 4). Finally, there is the muddiness of literary naturalism at a conceptual level, with writers in different places and times appropriating the label for approaches that vary in philosophical and scientific rigor. These reasons taken together could arguably undermine its cohesion as a movement. At the same time, philosophical naturalism continues to profoundly shape our world, and thus its literary sibling, to the degree it facilitates how naturalism has and continues to be imagined, remains consequential. Narrative is one of the essential coherence-making matrices humans have and thus is good at clarifying the tensions and implications of thought systems. One might say the facility with which a worldview brings coherence to human experience is an essential test of its viability. If a philosophical hypothesis cannot translate to experience, or can not do so in a way that meaningfully addresses our deepest questions and longings, it could be a sign of its explanatory limits.

Comments

Originally published in Literature and Belief, Vol. 43:1 & 2, pgs.85-105. 2024

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