naturalism

naturalism, as a term of literary history, primarily a French movement in prose fiction and (to a lesser extent) the drama during the final third of the 19th cent., although it is also applied to similar movements or groups of writers in other countries (e.g. Germany, the USA) in the latter decades of the 19th and early years of the 20th cents. In France Zola was the dominant practitioner and the chief exponent of its doctrines. His novel Thérèse Raquin (1867), together with the Goncourts' Germinie Lacerteux (1865), are considered as marking the beginnings of the movement. Other writers who shared the ideas and aims of naturalism are Daudet, Maupassant, and, in his early fiction, Huysmans.

Broadly speaking, naturalism is characterized by a refusal to idealize experience and by the persuasion that human life is strictly subject to natural laws. The naturalists shared with the earlier Realists the conviction that the everyday life of the middle and lower classes of their own day provided subjects worthy of serious literary treatment. These were to be rendered so far as possible without artificiality of plot and with scrupulous care for authenticity and accuracy of detail, thus investing the novel with the value of social history.

In Germany, the movement flourished from c.1885 until the 1890s, largely in the theatre, influenced both by Ibsen and by the Théâtre Libre, which visited Berlin in 1889; one of its principal exponents was Gerhart Hauptmann. See also Realism.