Knowra Naturalism (literature) Naturalism (literature) A literary movement that portrays people as shaped by heredity, environment, and social conditions, often emphasizing forces beyond individual control.
Literary realism : A literary movement that depicts ordinary life and social settings with close attention to observable detail. Naturalism extends realism’s attention to everyday life while stressing forces that constrain human choice.
Heredity : The transmission of biological traits from parents to offspring. Inherited traits and family histories can constrain a character’s choices and prospects.
Émile Zola : A French novelist and critic who became the leading theorist and practitioner of literary naturalism. Zola defined naturalist fiction as an inquiry into how heredity and environment shape people.
Germinal : An 1885 novel by Émile Zola about miners, labor conflict, and life in a French coal-mining community. Zola makes working conditions and poverty central forces in the miners’ lives.
Romanticism : A literary and artistic movement that emphasized imagination, emotion, and individual experience. Naturalism’s emphasis on external causes challenges Romantic confidence in individual agency.
Determinism : The view that events, including human actions, follow from prior causes and conditions. Naturalist plots often treat behavior as the result of heredity and circumstances rather than free choice.
Environment : The external physical, social, and cultural conditions in which an organism or person lives. Naturalist settings act as pressures that shape behavior rather than passive scenery.
The Experimental Novel : An 1880 essay by Émile Zola arguing that fiction could study human behavior through observation and causal analysis. This essay gives the movement its most influential statement of method.
Nana : An 1880 novel by Émile Zola about a Parisian actress and the society surrounding her rise and decline. The novel connects personal fate to class, sexuality, and Second Empire society.
Modernism : A broad movement in early twentieth-century literature and art that experimented with form and questioned inherited conventions. Modernist experimentation shifts attention from naturalism’s explanatory social observation toward fragmented experience.
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