American literary naturalism and its twentieth-century transformations

This study examines American literary naturalism as a narrative form and the ways in which it has been reworked in modern and postmodern texts. Departing from the work of such widely diverse theorists as Charles Child Walcutt, Donald Pizer, and Walter Benn Michaels, Paul Civello views naturalism not as a distinctly turn-of-the-century literary phenomenon but as a form of narrative that continued to manifest itself in later literary movements.

In tracing the evolution of this movement, Civello concentrates on three authors from distinctly different periods of American literature: Frank Norris, representative of nineteenth-century literary naturalism; Ernest Hemingway, a central figure in modernism; and Don DeLillo, a writer in the postmodern tradition.

Beginning with a discussion of the Darwinian roots of naturalism, Civello reads two representative texts by each of the three authors in light of scientific and philosophical discourse of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.