History of naturalism in america


History Of Naturalism In America
Naturalism was much more important as a movement in the States than in Great Britain. This can be partly explained by the fact that the social change was even faster and more radical in this country after the Civil War (1861-1865). The period saw the end of the agrarian myth of a pastoral America in the face of rapid industrialization, especially in the North, and the closing of the Frontier in 1890. The American dream of capitalistic success did not materialize either for most immigrants and the urban poor.
Out of these deep concerns, an original type of Naturalism was born, which could mix Zola's positivist ideology and a truly aesthetic innovativeness and a symbolic approach. It was represented by writers such as Stephen Crane (1871-1900) in The Red Badge of Courage (1896) and Maggie, a Girl of the Streets (1893); Frank Norris (1870-1902) in McTeague (1899); Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945) in An American Tragedy (1925); Upton Sinclair (1878-1968) in The Jungle (1906).
The Great Depression (1929-1935) that followed the 1929 Wall Street crash and ruined international trade, putting millions of workers worldwide ouf of a job, accordingly saw a resurgence of Naturalism, which lasted until the second World War. It is mainly represented by John Steinbeck (1902-1968), whose work is marked by compassion for poor and marginal people : Of Mice and Men (1937), The Grapes of Wrath (1939).
Richard Wright (1908-1960), an African American author whose Native Son (1940) deals with the problems of race and violence, was also a Naturalist.
(https://www.skyminds.net/19th-century-realism-naturalism/)

Characteristics
Characters. Frequently but not invariably ill-educated or lower-class characters whose lives are governed by the forces of heredity, instinct, and passion. Their attempts at exercising free will or choice are hamstrung by forces beyond their control; social Darwinism and other theories help to explain their fates to the reader. See June Howard's Form and History for information on the spectator in naturalism.
Setting. Frequently an urban setting, as in Norris's McTeague. See Lee Clark Mitchell's Determined Fictions, Philip Fisher's Hard Facts, and James R. Giles's The Naturalistic Inner-City Novel in America.
Techniques and plots. Walcutt says that the naturalistic novel offers "clinical, panoramic, slice-of-life" drama that is often a "chronicle of despair" (21). The novel of degeneration--Zola'sL'Assommoir and Norris's Vandover and the Brute, for example--is also a common type.
(https://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/natural.htm)

Themes
1.Walcutt identifies survival, determinism, violence, and taboo as key themes.
2. The "brute within" each individual, composed of strong and often warring emotions: passions, such as lust, greed, or the desire for dominance or pleasure; and the fight for survival in an amoral, indifferent universe. The conflict in naturalistic novels is often "man against nature" or "man against himself" as characters struggle to retain a "veneer of civilization" despite external pressures that threaten to release the "brute within."
3. Nature as an indifferent force acting on the lives of human beings. The romantic vision of Wordsworth--that "nature never did betray the heart that loved her"--here becomes Stephen Crane's view in "The Open Boat": "This tower was a giant, standing with its back to the plight of the ants. It represented in a degree, to the correspondent, the serenity of nature amid the struggles of the individual--nature in the wind, and nature in the vision of men. She did not seem cruel to him then, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent."
4. The forces of heredity and environment as they affect--and afflict--individual lives.
5. An indifferent, deterministic universe. Naturalistic texts often describe the futile attempts of human beings to exercise free will, often ironically presented, in this universe that reveals free will as an illusion.
(https://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/natural.htm)

Important Figures and Literary Works
Authors identified as naturalists, by era
(Before 1895)
Joseph Kirkland, Zury: The Meanest Man in Spring County (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1887)
Rebecca Harding Davis
E. W. Howe, The Story of a Country Town
Edward Eggleston, The Hoosier School-Master
Harold Frederic, The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896)
1895-1920 and beyond
Frank Norris
Theodore Dreiser
Jack London
Stephen Crane
Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905)
Ellen Glasgow, Barren Ground (1925)
Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Sport of the Gods (1902)
Henry Blake Fuller, The Cliff-Dwellers (NY: Harper and Brothers, 1893)
Kate Chopin, The Awakening
Hamlin Garland, Rose of Dutcher's Coolly (1895)
Ambrose Bierce
Upton Sinclair, The Jungle
David Graham Phillips, Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1917)
Robert Herrick, The Memoirs of an American Citizen (1905)
Abraham Cahan, The Rise of David Levinsky (1917)
Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (1919)
1920s-1959
John Dos Passos (1896-1970), U.S.A. trilogy (1938): The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936)
James T. Farrell (1904-1979), Studs Lonigan (1934)
John Steinbeck (1902-1968), The Grapes of Wrath (1939); The Winter of Our Discontent
Richard Wright, Native Son (1940), Black Boy (1945)
Norman Mailer (1923-2007), The Naked and the Dead (1948)
William Styron, Lie Down in Darkness (1951)
Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953)
Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm
Harriet Arnow, The Dollmaker (1954)
1960s-

William Faulkner
Ernest Hemingway
Joyce Carol Oates, them
Hubert Selby, Jr., Last Exit to Brooklyn
Don DeLillo
Cormac McCarthy 
(https://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/natural.htm)



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