A literary movement, an intensification of Realism, that portrayed characters as determined by heredity, environment and social circumstance largely beyond their own control, drawing its authority from contemporary biology and social science rather than from moral or psychological interiority. Emile Zola supplied its theory, most explicitly in the 1880 essay Le Roman experimental, and demonstrated it across the twenty novels of his Rougon-Macquart cycle, beginning with La Fortune des Rougon in 1871. American Naturalism followed later in the century in writers including Stephen Crane, Frank Norris and Theodore Dreiser, who treated characters as caught in forces of poverty, biology and the city they could not master. Where Realism observes ordinary life closely, Naturalism goes further, treating that life as a case study governed by law-like forces the narrative exists to expose.
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Disputed
Period, From (Year)1871 marks Zola's first Rougon-Macquart novel, but the theoretical grounding, drawn from Claude Bernard's 1865 Introduction a l'etude de la medecine experimentale, predates it, and national literatures adopted Naturalism at different points, American Naturalism only emerging in the 1890s. Period, To (Year)1902 marks Zola's death, but American Naturalism continued into the following decades in Dreiser's work, and no single closing date is agreed across the movement's several national literatures. Naturalism
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The movement's own theorist: his 1880 treatise Le Roman experimental set out Naturalism's method, and his Rougon-Macquart cycle put it into practice.
Source Emile Zola (Britannica)
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1. Encyclopaedia Britannica
Emile Zola (Britannica)
Associated Authors: Emile Zola
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