Emile zola naturalism

Naturalism is a literary movement beginning in the late nineteenth century, similar to literary realism in its rejection of Romanticism , but distinct in its embrace of determinism , detachment, scientific objectivism , and social commentary. Literary naturalism emphasizes observation and the scientific method in the fictional portrayal of reality.

Naturalism includes detachment, in which the author maintains an impersonal tone and disinterested point of view; determinism, which is defined as the opposite of free will, in which a character's fate has been decided, even predetermined , by impersonal forces of nature beyond human control; and a sense that the universe itself is indifferent to human life.

The novel would be an experiment where the author could discover and analyze the forces, or scientific laws, that influenced behavior, and these included emotion, heredity, and environment. The application of this method "called for a scientist to conduct controlled experiments that would either prove or disprove hypotheses regarding those phenomena".

Zola took this scientific method and argued that naturalism in literature should be like controlled experiments in which the characters function as the phenomena. Naturalism began as a branch of literary realism , and realism had favored fact, logic, and impersonality over the imaginative, symbolic, and supernatural. Frank Norris , an American journalist and novelist, whose work was predominantly in the naturalist genre, "placed realism, romanticism, and naturalism in a dialectic, in which realism and romanticism were opposing forces", and naturalism was a mixture of the two.

Norris's idea of naturalism differs from Zola's in that "it does not mention materialistic determinism or any other philosophic idea". Apart from Zola and Norris, there are various literary critics who have their own separate views on the matter.

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As said by Paul Civello , these critics can be grouped into four broad, and often overlapping, groups: early theorists, history-of-idea critics, European influence critics, and recent theorists. The early theorists saw naturalism thematically and in terms of literary technique. The history-of-idea critics understood it as an expression of the central ideas to an era.

The European influence critics viewed it in much the same way as Zola. For example, according to theorist Kornelije Kvas , naturalism presents "forms of human experience not spoken of before — the physiological aspect of human behavior, sexuality, poverty — as literary topics worthy of being dealt with.