Naturalism

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.