SOURCE: Howard, June. “Preface and Casting Out the Outcast: Naturalism and the Brute.” In Documents of American Realism and Naturalism, edited by Donald Pizer, pp. 386-403. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1985.

In the following essay, Howard discusses the defining characteristics of American literary naturalism, describing it as a literary form “that unremittingly attends to the large social questions of its period.”

Preface

The present study is a detailed reading of a single literary genre, American literary naturalism, as a distinctive response to its historical moment. As I make that statement its implications clamor for annotation—I may not mean exactly what the reader expects when I speak of genre, of history, or of literary texts as responses to history. The chapters that follow make those discriminations; they proceed more or less inductively, working from within familiar formulations to reconstruct our ideas of genre criticism, of the relation between...