SOURCE: Mottram, Ron. “Impulse toward the Visible: Frank Norris and Photographic Representation.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language 25, no. 4 (winter 1983): 574-96.

In the following essay, Mottram discusses the influence of photography and early motion pictures on Norris's writing.

The traditional view of Frank Norris as a principal American proponent of literary naturalism has proved to be inadequate to a full understanding of his work. It has also relegated him to a position of minor importance in American letters, worthy of serious study only as a link in the chain of literary history and as an example of late nineteenth-century interest in biological and environmental determinism. Some recent and more modern criticism, however, has suggested alternative approaches to Norris's work which shift attention from a social/scientific to an aesthetic consideration of his writing. This has revealed, as Joseph Katz put it, a Frank Norris “different from the one...