Scale Shifts from Polk Street to a Broken Earth; or, Literary Naturalism's Geontological Affordances

Abstract

IN HIS RECENT “RE-VISIONING AMERICAN LITERARY NATURALISM,” MARC Egnal identifies two problems in the study of American naturalism. First, naturalism scholars can be accused of a myopic preference for the canonical authors Frank Norris, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, and Stephen Crane. Then, based on this myopia, naturalism enjoys an undeservedly “broad temporal reach” as latter-day authors like Hemingway, DeLillo, and McCarthy earn the naturalist title by stylistic resemblance to Norris and company. Egnal proposes to solve both problems by replacing the author myopia with a Darwinian one; only “works in which the ‘laws’ of heredity, or environment, or both strongly influenced how characters behaved” are