Naturalism
Naturalism pushed realism to its logical, sometimes crude extreme: novelists as researchers, plots as experiments, and subjects (alcoholism, poverty, industrial labor) realism's decorum had never allowed onto the page before. Seven books run from Zola's own founding cruelty through America's naturalized version of the same nerve.
Thérèse RaquinÉmile Zola · 1867
Lvl 3224ppZola's early, brutal experiment: two adulterous lovers murder an inconvenient husband and are destroyed, methodically, by their own guilt, naturalism's method stated as bluntly as it ever gets.
NanaÉmile Zola · 1880
Lvl 4448ppZola's courtesan rises and falls through Second Empire Paris, narrated with the same clinical distance you'd give a disease chart.
Bel-AmiGuy de Maupassant · 1885
Lvl 4320ppMaupassant's hustler sleeps and lies his way up French journalism: naturalism's determinism running on pure, charming amorality.
The AwakeningKate Chopin · 1899
Lvl 5195ppChopin's Louisiana wife discovers desires her marriage has no room for: American naturalism's compact, devastating entry, banned on publication.
Sister CarrieTheodore Dreiser · 1900
Lvl 4465ppDreiser's rural girl rises in Chicago and New York while the men around her fall: environment and appetite doing exactly what the movement promised they would.
The JungleUpton Sinclair · 1906
Lvl 4413ppSinclair's Lithuanian immigrant is chewed up by the same meatpacking plants that are chewing up the meat: muckraking journalism that started as, and outgrew, a novel.
GerminalÉmile Zola · 1885
Lvl 5512ppThe capstone: Zola sends a starving miner into a doomed strike and lets the mine itself become a character: naturalism's bleakest, most political achievement.