NATURALISM IN AMERICAN FARM FICTION
1961; American studies; Volume: 2; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2153-6856
Autores Tópico(s)American Environmental and Regional History
Resumopartial eclipse of writers like James T. Farrell, literary naturalism in the United States has fallen into obscurity. Whether it is ndead as the wellknown dodo, as Randall Stewart says in a recent article, 1 or whether it has merely been transmuted and transformed into something no longer recognizable, the kind of naturalism practiced by Crane and Dreiser assuredly cannot be said to be a dominant force in contemporary literature. It is possibly significant that the period in which literary naturalism, characterized by an attitude and a method, was most influential in American writing coincided roughly with that in which the farm novel, a literary genre characterized by its theme and setting, enjoyed its greatest vogue. Despite a popular conception of farm fiction as prevailingly nostalgic and sentimentally romantic, a careful study of the whole genre will reveal that many of its best practitioners employed the methods of naturalism and often shared the attitude toward man and the universe held by the greater naturalists.
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