Naturalism

     Naturalism is a term of literary history, primarily a French movement in prose fiction and 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 in the later decades of the 19th and early years of the 20th cents. In France Emile Zola (1840-1902) was the dominant practitioner of Naturalism in prose fiction and the chief exponent of its doctrines.

     The emergence of Naturalism does not mark a radical break with Realism, rather the new style is a logical extension of it. Broadly speaking, Naturalism is characterized by a refusal to idealize experience and by the persuasion that human life is strictly subjected 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. Emphasis was laid on the influence of the material and economic environment on behaviour, especially in Zola, on the determining effects of physical and hereditary factors in forming the individual temperament.