American Literary Naturalism

Donald Pizer

Description

A collection of Pizer’s late career essays on various writers and subjects related to American naturalism

The book collects Pizer’s late career essays on various writers and subjects related to American naturalism. Of these, two seek to describe the movement as a whole, six are on specific writers or works (with an emphasis on Theodore Dreiser), and two reprint informative interviews by Pizer on the subject. The essays reflect Pizer’s mature engagement of the subject he has spent a lifetime exploring.

Preface; Acknowledgments; Part I. General Essays; 1. American Naturalism: A Primer; 2. Critical Conceptions of American Realism and Naturalism, 1870–1970; Part II. Specific Writers and Works; 3. Naturalism and the Visual Arts: Dreiser, Crane, and Steinbeck; 4. Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”: How Not to Read Naturalist Fiction; 5. Norman Mailer, Theodore Dreiser, and the Politics of American Literary History; 6. John Dos Passos and Harlan: Three Variations on a Theme; 7. Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and 1920s; Flapper Culture; 8. Dreiser’s Relationships with Women; Part III. Donald Pizer and the Study of American Naturalism; 9. The Study of American Naturalism: A Personal Retrospective; 10. Stephen C. Brennan: Interview with Donald Pizer; Index.

Sujets

• USA
• United States of America
• América
• 19th century
• Modern history
• Hispanic American
• Literary criticism
• American
• États-Unis
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 09 octobre 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781785275487
• Langue: English

Extrait

American Literary Naturalism
American Literary Naturalism
Late Essays
Donald Pizer
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
 
This edition first published in UK and USA 2020
by ANTHEM PRESS
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
 
Copyright © Donald Pizer 2020
 
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
 
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
 
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
 
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020946153
 
ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-546-3 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78527-546-1 (Hbk)
 
This title is also available as an e-book.
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgments
Part I. General Essays
  1. American Naturalism: A Primer
  2. Critical Conceptions of American Realism and Naturalism, 1870–1970
Part II. Specific Writers and Works
  3. Naturalism and the Visual Arts: Dreiser, Crane, and Steinbeck
  4. Jack London’s “To Build a Fire”: How Not to Read Naturalist Fiction
  5. Norman Mailer, Theodore Dreiser, and the Politics of American Literary History
  6. John Dos Passos and Harlan: Three Variations on a Theme
  7. Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and 1920s Flapper Culture
  8. Dreiser’s Relationships with Women
Part III. Donald Pizer and the Study of American Naturalism
  9. The Study of American Naturalism: A Personal Retrospective
10. Stephen C. Brennan: Interview with Donald Pizer
Index
PREFACE
It was not uncommon during the early twentieth century for publishers to issue a volume by recently deceased authors, titled along the lines of “Last Words” or “A Final Gathering,” which collected the author’s late work, published and unpublished, that had not previously appeared in book form. (Both Stephen Crane and Joseph Conrad, for example, had volumes of this kind appear not long after their deaths.) Although I am still alive as I write this preface, the present collection of my essays is intended to serve a similar purpose by issuing in convenient form a collection of my late and previously uncollected essays on both American literary naturalism in general and specific naturalist authors.
Over a long career (it began in the mid-1950s), I have published three previous collections of essays on American naturalists: Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (1966; 2nd rev. ed., 1984); The Theory and Practice of American Literary Naturalism (1993); and American Literary Naturalism: Recent and Uncollected Essays (2002). In addition, I have published during this past decade five collections of my essays on individual naturalist writers: Writer in Motion: The Major Fiction of Stephen Crane (2009); Toward a Modernist Style: John Dos Passos. A Collection of Essays (2013); “The Game as It Is Played”: Essays on Theodore Dreiser (2013); The Significant Hamlin Garland: A Collection of Essays (2014); and Frank Norris and American Naturalism (2018). Of the ten essays collected in this volume, two were initially published in the 1990s, eight since the turn of the century, and none, with the exception of “The Study of American Naturalism,” which served as the introduction to my The Theory and Practice of American Literary Naturalism , has appeared in any of my previous essay collections.
As in my other essay collections on naturalism, the essays in this volume have been divided into sections consisting of those on naturalism in general and of those on specific naturalist writers. It is not surprising that most of the latter section is devoted to essays on Theodore Dreiser. His career and work have been one of my principal concerns ever since I began writing about him in the mid-1960s. The third section consists of two personal essays—my review of my career as a critic of American naturalism, which I published as the introduction to The Theory and Practice of American Naturalism in 1993, and a 2010 interview of me by Stephen Brennan on the same subject. Essays of this kind may not be considered academic scholarship by some, but I nevertheless believe that they cast considerable light on important areas of my thinking about the nature of American naturalism. In particular, the interview by Brennan renders some of these ideas more directly and emphatically than is commonly found in academic expression.
As I contemplate the full extent of my work as a scholar and critic of American literary naturalism, it occurs to me that much of the best of it—in the senses of both cogency and quality of writing—has been in the essay form. I make no apology for my books on a single topic, but I nevertheless believe that I found in the compressed form of the essay a form more congenial to my particular capabilities as a writer than that of a fully extended study. This may be related to the impatience I have always had with the typical academic monograph, a form in which the author has a single major point which is seemingly endlessly repeated in different contexts. Or it may derive from my own predilection for conciseness in all expression. But in any case, here is a final sampling of my work in that form.
The essays are reprinted in the form of their original publication except for the correction of obvious errors, the occasional recasting of a poorly chosen term, and—in a few instances—the omission of material irrelevant to the present purpose of the essay. Such omissions are indicated by a line of asterisks in the text.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I wish to thank the following journals and presses for permission to republish the essays contained in this volume. The essays are listed in the order of their appearance in the book.
“American Literary Naturalism: A Primer”
American History through Literature , ed. Tom Quirk and Gary Scharnhorst (Detroit: Scribner’s, 2006); 746–53. Copyright 2006 by Charles Scribner’s Sons. Reprinted by permission of Cengage (Detroit, MI).
“Critical Conceptions of American Realism and Naturalism, 1870–1970”
The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism: Howells to London , ed. Donald Pizer (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 1–18. Copyright 1995 by Cambridge University Press. Reprinted by permission.
“Naturalism and the Visual Arts: Dreiser, Crane, and Steinbeck”
The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism , ed. Keith Newlin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 463–82. Copyright 2011 by Oxford University Press. Reprinted by permission.
“Jack London’s ‘To Build a Fire’: How Not to Read Naturalist Fiction”
Philosophy and Literature 34 (April 2010): 218–27. Copyright 2010 by Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted by permission of Johns Hopkins University Press.
“Norman Mailer, Theodore Dreiser, and the Politics of American Literary History”
Sewanee Review , 122 (Summer 2014): 459–72. Copyright 2014 by Sewanee Review. Reprinted by permission.
“John Dos Passos and Harlan: Three Variations on a Theme”
Arizona Quarterly 71 (Spring 2015): 1–23. Copyright 2015 by the Arizona Quarterly. Reprinted by permission.
“Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy and 1920s Flapper Culture”
Studies in American Naturalism 10 (Winter 2015): 123–32. Copyright 2015 by the University of Nebraska Press. Reprinted by permission.
“Dreiser’s Relationships with Women”
American Literary Realism 50 (Fall 2017): 63–75. Reprinted by permission of the University of Illinois Press.
“The Study of American Naturalism: A Personal Retrospective”
Donald Pizer, The Theory and Practice of American Literary Naturalism (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993): 1–10. Copyright 1993 by Southern Illinois University Press. Reprinted by permission.
Stephen Brennan, “Literary Naturalism as a Humanism: Donald Pizer on Definitions of Naturalism”
Studies in American Naturalism 5 (Summer 2010): 8–20. Copyright 2010 by the University of Nebraska Press. Reprinted by permission.
Part I
GENERAL ESSAYS
Chapter 1
AMERICAN NATURALISM
A PRIMER *
From its late nineteenth-century beginnings, critics of American literary naturalism have disagreed, often violently, about its nature and value. Was the movement an exotic offshoot of a decadent French culture or was it a truthful response, after a quarter century of “lying” by an older generation of writers, to the actual conditions of late nineteenth-century American life? Did naturalism posit a human condition in which the individual was a powerless cipher at the mercy of natural forces, including his own animal brutishness, or did it permit the individual to retain at least vestiges of both free