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For other meanings see Naturalism. Naturalism should also not be confused with naturism, i.e., nudism. Naturalism refers to a number of different topics: Naturalism (philosophy) is any of several philosophical stances which do not claim that phenomena or hypotheses commonly labeled as supernatural necessarily do not exist or are wrong, but insist that they are not inherently different from natural phenomena or hypotheses, and that...
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Naturalism is a movement in theater, film, and literature that seeks to replicate a believable everyday reality, as opposed to such movements as Romanticism or Surrealism, in which subjects may receive highly symbolic, idealistic, or even supernatural treatment. For other usages see Theatre (disambiguation) Theater (American English) or Theatre (British English and widespread usage among theatre professionals in the US) is that branch of the performing arts concerned with acting out stories in front of an audience using combinations of speech, gesture, music, dance, sound and spectacle — indeed...
For other uses see film (disambiguation) Film refers to the celluliod media on which movies are printed Film — also called movies, the cinema, the silver screen, moving pictures, photoplays, picture shows, flicks, or motion pictures, — is a field that encompasses motion pictures as an art form or as part of...
Old book bindings at the Merton College library. ...
Verisimilitude, in literature, is how fully the characters and actions in a work of fiction conform to our sense of reality. ...
Everyday life is the sum total of every aspect of common human life as it is routinely lived. ...
Romanticism was a secular and intellectual movement that originated in late 18th century Western Europe. ...
Kay Sage. ...
Theatre In theatre, naturalism developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It refers to theater that tries to create a perfect illusion of reality through detailed sets, an unpoetic literary style that reflects the way real people speak, and a style of acting that tries to recreate reality (often by seeking complete identification with the role, as advocated by Stanislavsky). Alternative meaning: Nineteenth Century (periodical) (18th century — 19th century — 20th century — more centuries) As a means of recording the passage of time, the 19th century was that century which lasted from 1801-1900 in the sense of the Gregorian calendar. ...
(19th century - 20th century - 21st century - more centuries) Decades: 1900s 1910s 1920s 1930s 1940s 1950s 1960s 1970s 1980s 1990s As a means of recording the passage of time, the 20th century was that century which lasted from 1901–2000 in the sense of the Gregorian calendar (1900–1999 in the...
Konstantin (Constantin) Stanislavski (Константи́н Серге́евич Станисла́вский / Алексе́ев) (January 5, 1863 - August 7, 1938) was a Russian theatre and acting innovator. ...
Naturalism was criticized in the mid-20th century by Bertolt Brecht and others who argued instead for breaking the illusion of reality in order to encourage detached consideration of the issues the play raises. Though it retains a sizable following, most Western theater today follows a semi-naturalistic approach, with naturalistic acting but less realistic design elements (especially set pieces). This article or section does not cite its references or sources. ...
Naturalistic performance is often unsuitable when performing other styles of theatre, particularly older styles. For example, Shakespearean verse often requires an artificial acting style and scenography; naturalistic actors try to speak the lines as if they are normal, everyday speech, which often sounds awkward. There are a variety of theatrical styles used in theatre and drama. ...
William Shakespeare—born April 1564; baptised April 26, 1564; died April 23, 1616 (O.S.), May 3, 1616 (N.S.)—has a reputation as the greatest of all writers in English. ...
In film, which permits a greater illusionism than is possible on stage, naturalism is the normal style, although there have been many exceptions, including the German Expressionists and modern directors such as Baz Luhrmann, who have revelled in artificiality. Note that even a fantastical genre such as science fiction can be naturalistic, as in the gritty, proletarian environment of the commercial space-freighter in Alien. Expressionism in filmmaking developed in Germany (especially Berlin) during the 1920s. ...
Baz Luhrmann (born Mark Anthony Luhrmann on September 17, 1962) is an Australian film director. ...
Science fiction is a form of speculative fiction principally dealing with the impact of imagined science and technology, or both, upon society and persons as individuals. ...
Alien (1979), a science-fiction/horror film, directed by Ridley Scott, kicked off a long succession of sequel films and related works set in the fictional world it depicts. ...
Literature As in film, naturalism is the general style, although the flexibility and amorphous quality of prose, as opposed to the concrete visual imagery of film, has allowed for a great number of other forms. In this context, naturalism is the outgrowth of Realism, a prominent literary movement in late 19th-century France and elsewhere. Realism in art and literature is the depiction of subjects as they appear, without embellishment or interpretation. ...
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Alternative meaning: Nineteenth Century (periodical) The 19th century lasted from 1801 to 1900 in the Gregorian calendar. ...
Naturalistic writers were influenced by the evolution theory of Charles Darwin. They believed that one's heredity and surroundings decide one's character. Whereas realism seeks only to describe subjects as they really are, naturalism also attempts to determine "scientifically" the underlying forces (i.e. the environment or heredity) influencing these subjects' actions. They are both opposed to romanticism, in which subjects may receive highly symbolic, idealistic, or even supernatural treatment. Naturalistic works often include uncouth or sordid subject matter. For example, Émile Zola's works had a frankness about sexuality along with a pervasive pessimism. Naturalistic works exposed the dark harshness of life, including poverty, racism, prejudice, disease, prostitution, filth, etc. They were often very pessimistic and frequently criticised for being too blunt. In his lifetime, Charles Darwin gained international fame as an influential scientist examining controversial topics. ...
Heredity (the adjective is hereditary) is the transfer of characteristics from parent to offspring, either through their genes or through the social institution called inheritance (for example, a title of nobility is passed from individual to individual according to relevant customs and/or laws). ...
Romanticism was a secular and intellectual movement that originated in late 18th century Western Europe. ...
Émile Zola Émile Zola (April 2, 1840 – September 29, 1902) was an influential French novelist, the most important example of the literary school of naturalism, and a major figure in the political liberalization of France. ...
Literary naturalism denotes a particular genre of fiction that developed in the USA in the 1890s, associated principally with writers such as Abraham Cahan, Ellen Glasgow, David Graham Phillips, Jack London, and most prominently Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser. The term naturalism operates primarily in counterdistinction to realism, particularly the mode of realism codified in the 1870s and 1880s, and associated with William Dean Howells and Henry James.
It is important to clarify the relationship between American literary naturalism, with which this entry is primarily concerned, from the genre also known as naturalism that flourished in France from the 1850s to the 1880s. French naturalism, as exemplified by Gustave Flaubert, and especially Emile Zola, can be regarded as a programmatic, well-defined and coherent theory of fiction that self-consciously rejected the notion of freewill, and dedicated itself to the documentary and “scientific” exposition of human behaviour as being determined by, as Zola put it, “nerves and blood”.
Many of the American naturalists, especially Norris and London, were heavily influenced by Zola. They sought explanations for human behaviour in natural science, and were sceptical, at least, of organised religion and beliefs in human freewill. However, the Americans did not form a coherent literary movement, and their occasional critical and theoretical reflections do not present a uniform philosophy. Although Zola was a touchstone of contemporary debates over genre, Dreiser, perhaps the most important of the naturalist writers, regarded Balzac as a greater influence. Naturalism in American literature is therefore best understood historically in the generational manner outlined in the first paragraph above. In philosophical and generic terms, American naturalism must be defined rather more loosely, as a reaction against the realist fiction of the 1870s and 1880s, whose scope was limited to middle-class or “local color” topics, with taboos on sexuality and violence. The most significant elements of this reaction can be summarised as follows.
Naturalist fiction often concentrated on the non-Anglo, ethnically marked inhabitants of the growing American cities, many of them immigrants and most belonging to a class-spectrum ranging from the destitute to the lower middle-class. The naturalists were not the first to concentrate on the industrialised American city, but they were significant in that they believed that the realist tools refined in the 1870s and 1880s were inadequate to represent it. Abraham Cahan, for example, sought both to represent and to address the Jewish community of New York's East Side, of which he was a member. The fiction of Theodore Dreiser, the son of first and second generation immigrants from Central Europe, features many German and Irish figures. Frank Norris and Stephen Crane, themselves from established middle-class Anglophone families also registered the ethnic mix of the metropolis, though for the most part via reductive and offensive stereotypes. In somewhat different ways, more marginal to the mainstream of naturalism, Ellen Glasgow's version of realism was specifically directed against the mythologising of the South, while the series of “problem novels” by David Graham Phillips, epitomised by the prostitution novel Susan Lenox: Her Fall and Rise (1917), can be regarded as naturalistic by virtue of their underclass subject-matter.
Allied to this, naturalist writers were sceptical towards, or downright hostile to, the notions of bourgeois individualism that characterised realist novels about middle-class life. Most naturalists demonstrated a concern with the animal or the irrational motivations for human behaviour, sometimes manifested in connection with sexuality and violence. Moreover, and here they differed strikingly from their French counterparts, one of the classi
See also Realism in art and literature is the depiction of subjects as they appear, without embellishment or interpretation. ...
Naturalism in art refers to the depiction of realistic objects in a natural setting. ...
Naturalism is any of several philosophical stances, typically those descended from materialism and pragmatism, that do not distinguish the supernatural from nature. ...
Sociological naturalism is a term used in sociology, for the view that natural world and social world are roughly identical and governed by similar principles. ...
This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ...
External links - American literary naturalism
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