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Frank Norris has been viewed as a significant literary critic in one major way. His principal and quite specific image for most has been that of a spokesman for the literary movement which first developed in France in the wake of Balzacian and Flaubertian realism and was then brought to 1890s America: literary naturalism, or Zolaism, as it was sometimes called. Norris is seen as its premier American apologist, offering a positive and even celebrative description of the qualities of naturalism which distinguished it from romanticism and realism. Thus, typical is C. Hugh Holman's picture of him as a touchstone figure in A Handbook to Literature (1980): he was the movement's "most vocal expounder as the century ended." To that cameo was added this enhancement: "Frank Norris ... wrote naturalistic novels in conscious imitation of Zola and made a critical defense of the school, The Responsibilities of the Novelist, in which he saw its real enemy was Realism and not Romanticism." One does not, then, offer an explanation of the naturalistic tradition in America without making reference to Norris as both a practitioner and a theorist.
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