The Department of English

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Twisted From the Ordinary: Essays on American Literary Naturalism

Edited by Mary E. Papke

American literary naturalism both seduces and repulses the reader, disrupting stable notions of individual and moral coherence. Usually associated with works such as Frank Norris's McTeague and Stephen Crane's "The Open Boat," naturalism draws on nineteenth-century theories of hereditary and environmental determinism, emphasizing the role of chance in characters' struggles for survival in an increasingly industrial, capitalistic, urban jungle. The essays in this volume revise the canon of naturalism, looking beyond the classic period of the 1890s to uncover naturalistic tendencies already at work in such mid-nineteenth-century authors as Rebecca Harding Davis and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps and to elucidate the naturalistic themes exploited more recently by postmodern authors such as Raymond Carver and Don DeLillo. The volume thus tests the generic boundaries of American literary naturalism and shows its ongoing relevance in understanding a broad set of themes, ranging from Victorian sentimentalism and the overdetermination of violence in true-crime novels to the ethical implications of recent scientific research and the social forces shaping selfhood in the twenty-first century.