American Literature Site Updates

Rebecca Harding Davis bibliography updates

2012-05-22T10:40:00.003-07:00

I've updated the Rebecca Harding Davis bibliography at http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/davisrh.htm or http://www.donnamcampbell.org/amlit/davisrh.htm

Incidentally, you can also get to the main site by going to http://www.donnamcampbell.org.

Updates to pages and new search boxes

2012-02-29T23:17:00.003-08:00

I'm replacing the old PicoSearch search boxes with Google Custom Search. There will be ads (as there are with Pico), but you can limit your search to just the American Literature sites by using amlit as one of your search terms.

Update to the Frank Norris bibliography

2012-01-16T14:50:00.000-08:00

Updates to the Frank Norris bibliography, http://www.howellssociety.org/norrisnew.htm.

Bibliographies and queries updates

2011-11-12T21:41:00.001-08:00

Updates to bibliographies and queries at the Howells Society, Wharton Society, and Crane Society sites.See especially Melissa Pennell's updates to the early bibliographies at the Wharton Society site .
Updates to the Maria Cristina Mena bibliography: http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/menabib.htm.

Updates to the Wharton Society site

2011-10-15T10:00:00.000-07:00

I've created a New Books page for the Wharton Society site and have updated the bibliography and the queries pages. You can see them all at http://www.edithwhartonsociety.org.

University of Virginia Text Center files moved

2011-09-07T09:46:00.000-07:00

There are a lot of links to the University of Virginia Text Center at the author society and American author sites, but most of the texts, which used to be freely available, have now been been incorporated into subscription databases and require a password.

I'll be changing these links to free versions if I can find them, but it may take a while--sorry.

American literature sites back online

2011-05-26T15:26:00.000-07:00

The American literature and author society web sites are back online. WSU has given them a domain name, although the old one will still work: http://public.wsu.edu/~campbelld.

American literature and author sites should be up by the weekend

2011-05-26T03:57:00.000-07:00

The Washington State University server is still down in parts, so the American literature and other sites aren't accessible yet. They should be available by the weekend, according to WSU's IT department.

Naturalism in American Literature (alternate page until the Literary Movements site is available)

2011-05-24T13:17:00.001-07:00

American Literary Naturalism

The term naturalism describes a type of literature that attempts to apply scientific principles of objectivity and detachment to its study of human beings. Unlike realism, which focuses on literary technique, naturalism implies a philosophical position: for naturalistic writers, since human beings are, in Emile Zola's phrase, "human beasts," characters can be studied through their relationships to their surroundings. Zola's 1880 description of this method in Le roman experimental (The Experimental Novel, 1880) follows Claude Bernard's medical model and the historian Hippolyte Taine's observation that "virtue and vice are products like vitriol and sugar"--that is, that human beings as "products" should be studied impartially, without moralizing about their natures. Other influences on American naturalists include Herbert Spencer and Joseph LeConte.

Through this objective study of human beings, naturalistic writers believed that the laws behind the forces that govern human lives might be studied and understood. Naturalistic writers thus used a version of the scientific method to write their novels; they studied human beings governed by their instincts and passions as well as the ways in which the characters' lives were governed by forces of heredity and environment. Although they used the techniques of accumulating detail pioneered by the realists, the naturalists thus had a specific object in mind when they chose the segment of reality that they wished to convey.

In George Becker's famous and much-annotated and contested phrase, naturalism's philosophical framework can be simply described as "pessimistic materialistic determinism." Another such concise definition appears in the introduction to American Realism: New Essays. In that piece,"The Country of the Blue," Eric Sundquist comments, "Revelling in the extraordinary, the excessive, and the grotesque in order to reveal the immutable bestiality of Man in Nature, naturalism dramatizes the loss of individuality at a physiological level by making a Calvinism without God its determining order and violent death its utopia" (13).

A modified definition appears in Donald Pizer's Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction, Revised Edition (1984):

[T]he naturalistic novel usually contains two tensions or contradictions, and . . . the two in conjunction comprise both an interpretation of experience and a particular aesthetic recreation of experience. In other words, the two constitute the theme and form of the naturalistic novel. The first tension is that between the subject matter of the naturalistic novel and the concept of man which emerges from this subject matter. The naturalist populates his novel primarily from the lower middle class or the lower class. . . . His fictional world is that of the commonplace and unheroic in which life would seem to be chiefly the dull round of daily existence, as we ourselves usually conceive of our lives. But the naturalist discovers in this world those qualities of man usually associated with the heroic or adventurous, such as acts of violence and passion which involve sexual adventure or bodily strength and which culminate in desperate moments and violent death. A naturalistic novel is thus an extension of realism only in the sense that both modes often deal with the local and contemporary. The naturalist, however, discovers in this material the extraordinary and excessive in human nature. The second tension involves the theme of the naturalistic novel. The naturalist often describes his characters as though they are conditioned and controlled by environment, heredity, instinct, or chance. But he also suggests a compensating humanistic value in his characters or their fates which affirms the significance of the individual and of his life. The tension here is that between the naturalist's desire to represent in fiction the new, discomfiting truths which he has found in the ideas and life of his late nineteenth-century world, and also his desire to find some meaning in experience which reasserts the validity of the human enterprise. (10-11)

For further definitions, see also The Cambridge Guide to American Realism and Naturalism, Charles Child Walcutt's American Literary Naturalism: A Divided Stream, June Howard's Form and History in American Literary Naturalism, Walter Benn Michaels's The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism, Lee Clark Mitchell's Determined Fictions, Mark Selzer's Bodies and Machines, and other works from the naturalism bibliography. See Lars Ahnebrink, Richard Lehan, and Louis J. Budd for information on the intellectual European and American backgrounds of naturalism.

Characters. Frequently but not invariably ill-educated or lower-class characters whose lives are governed by the forces of heredity, instinct, and passion. Their attempts at exercising free will or choice are hamstrung by forces beyond their control; social Darwinism and other theories help to explain their fates to the reader. See June Howard's Form and History for information on the spectator in naturalism. Setting. Frequently an urban setting, as in Norris's McTeague. See Lee Clark Mitchell's Determined Fictions, Philip Fisher's Hard Facts, and James R. Giles's The Naturalistic Inner-City Novel in America.

Techniques and plots. Walcutt says that the naturalistic novel offers "clinical, panoramic, slice-of-life" drama that is often a "chronicle of despair" (21). The novel of degeneration--Zola's L'Assommoir and Norris's Vandover and the Brute, for example--is also a common type.

1.Walcutt identifies survival, determinism, violence, and taboo as key themes. 2. The "brute within" each individual, composed of strong and often warring emotions: passions, such as lust, greed, or the desire for dominance or pleasure; and the fight for survival in an amoral, indifferent universe. The conflict in naturalistic novels is often "man against nature" or "man against himself" as characters struggle to retain a "veneer of civilization" despite external pressures that threaten to release the "brute within."

3. Nature as an indifferent force acting on the lives of human beings. The romantic vision of Wordsworth--that "nature never did betray the heart that loved her"--here becomes Stephen Crane's view in "The Open Boat": "This tower was a giant, standing with its back to the plight of the ants. It represented in a degree, to the correspondent, the serenity of nature amid the struggles of the individual--nature in the wind, and nature in the vision of men. She did not seem cruel to him then, nor beneficent, nor treacherous, nor wise. But she was indifferent, flatly indifferent."

4. The forces of heredity and environment as they affect--and afflict--individual lives.

5. An indifferent, deterministic universe. Naturalistic texts often describe the futile attempts of human beings to exercise free will, often ironically presented, in this universe that reveals free will as an illusion.

Frank Norris

Theodore Dreiser

Jack London

Stephen Crane

Edith Wharton, The House of Mirth (1905)

Ellen Glasgow, Barren Ground (1925)

John Dos Passos (1896-1970), U.S.A. trilogy (1938): The 42nd Parallel (1930), 1919 (1932), and The Big Money (1936)

James T. Farrell (1904-1979), Studs Lonigan (1934)

John Steinbeck (1902-1968), The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

Richard Wright, Native Son (1940), Black Boy (1945)

Norman Mailer (1923-2007), The Naked and the Dead (1948)

William Styron, Lie Down in Darkness (1951)

Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March (1953)

Other writers sometimes identified as naturalists:

Nelson Algren, The Man with the Golden Arm

Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio (1919)

Harriet Arnow, The Dollmaker (1954)

Ambrose Bierce

Abraham Cahan, The Making of an American Citizen

Kate Chopin, The Awakening

Rebecca Harding Davis

Don DeLillo

Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Sport of the Gods

Edward Eggleston, The Hoosier School-Master

William Faulkner

Harold Frederic, The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896)

Henry Blake Fuller, The Cliff-Dwellers

Hamlin Garland, Rose of Dutcher's Coolly

Robert Herrick, The Memoirs of an American Citizen (1905)

Ernest Hemingway

E. W. Howe, The Story of a Country Town

Joseph Kirkland,

Joyce Carol Oates

David Graham Phillips

Hubert Selby, Jr.

Upton Sinclair, The Jungle

When it occurs to a man that nature does not regard him as important, and that she feels she would not maim the universe by disposing of him, he at first wishes to throw bricks at the temple, and he hates deeply the fact that there are no bricks and no temples.

--Stephen Crane, "The Open Boat" A man said to the universe:

"Sir, I exist!"

"However," replied the universe,

"The fact has not created in me

A sense of obligation." --Stephen Crane (1894, 1899)

To cite this page on a Works Cited page according to current MLA guidelines, supply the correct dates and use the suggested format below. If you are quoting another author quoted on this page, either look up the original source or indicate that original quotation is cited on ("Qtd. in") this page. The following is drawn from the examples and guidelines in the MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers, 7th ed. (2009), section 5.6.2.

Campbell, Donna M. "Naturalism in American Literature. " Literary Movements. Dept. of English, Washington State University. Date of publication or most recent update (listed above as the "last modified" date; you don't need to indicate the time). Web. Date you accessed the page.

Web outage at www.wsu.edu should be repaired by 5/27/11

2011-05-24T12:14:00.000-07:00

There are still significant outages at the WSU web site and hence all the American literature and author society pages, despite the incorrect "no outages" message on the IT web page: HTTP://infotech.wsu.edu/netops/NetStatus/Default.aspx. The IT department has said that these pages should be back online by 5/27/11. Again, I'm sorry for the inconvenience.

WSU main web site still is down, affecting American lit web pages

2011-05-23T06:47:00.000-07:00

The Washington State University web site was offline for server upgrades over the weekend, and although the main page says that there are no outages, the IT department says that faculty web pages are still down and will be back up "later today or in a few days." In other words, the American lit web pages and author society pages are down but should be available soon.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Updates to Mary Austin bibliography

2011-04-14T09:17:00.001-07:00

Updates to the Mary Austin bibliography:
http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/austinbib.htm

New Whitman papers discovered

2011-04-12T12:33:00.000-07:00

http://newsroom.unl.edu/releases/2011/04/12/UNL+scholar+discovers+thousands+of+new+Walt+Whitman+papers

UNL scholar discovers thousands of new Walt Whitman papers

As a clerk in the U.S. Attorney General's Office in the 1860s and 1870s, Walt Whitman had a firsthand view of the legal, cultural and ideological challenges facing the nation after the Civil War. That experience, most believe, shaped his later works of poetry and prose.

Now, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln researcher [Prof. Kenneth Price] has discovered nearly 3,000 previously unknown Whitman documents from that era -- a trove of information that sheds new light on the legendary poet's post-war thinking, as well as Whitman's published reflections on the state of the nation that soon followed.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman bibliography

2011-04-08T06:33:00.000-07:00

I've posted a new bibliography for Charlotte Perkins Gilman: http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/gilmanbib.htm.

Updates to the Sui Sin Far bibliography

2011-03-17T09:43:00.000-07:00

Updates to the Sui Sin Far (Edith Eaton) bibliography at http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/farbib.htm , including several from 2010 and some not found in the MLA Bibliography.

Updates to Frances E. W. Harper Bibliography

2011-02-18T09:36:00.000-08:00

I've updated the Frances E. W. Harper page and Bibliography http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/harbib.htm.

Also updated: Charles W. Chesnutt bibliography: http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/amlit/chesbib.htm.

MLA Calls for Papers

2011-02-02T08:19:00.000-08:00

The list for MLA 2012 Calls for Papers (Seattle, WA) is available here:

http://www.mla.org/cfp_search

David Graham Phillips in the New York Times

2011-01-17T08:03:00.000-08:00

I'm updating the David Graham Phillips page to include a link to a (rare) New York Times article on the author. Excerpts:

David Graham Phillips, the author in question, had just been christened by H. L. Mencken as “the leading American novelist.” Now largely forgotten, he was a star of the first decade of the 20th century, a sort of Progressive Era Tom Wolfe — right down to his white suits that set him apart in the newspaper offices where he first made his mark.

Like Wolfe, Phillips was a biting social critic who used his journalistic renown to mount a successful fiction career, churning out some two dozen page-turning novels that wrapped exposés of the worlds of insurance, finance and politics into tales of romantic love. And like Wolfe, who laid out his complaints in the much debated 1989 essay “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast,” Phillips believed that too many American novels were “largely imitative of ideals and methods that are narrow and that are totally inadequate as a description of life as it is in America today,” and instead set out, as The Saturday Evening Post put it, to “master” America, “to learn her by heart, inspired by the task of expressing and interpreting her.”

As a journalist, Phillips was the quintessential crusader. In 1906, he wrote a famous series of articles on several United States senators who he alleged (in language “longer on adjectives than facts,” Upton Sinclair said) were corrupted by the likes of Rockefeller, Vanderbilt and Carnegie. The series inspired President Theodore Roosevelt to attack Phillips as “The Man With the Muck Rake” in a speech at the Gridiron Club, introducing the term “muckraker” into the language. (In a private letter, Roosevelt went further, calling Phillips a “foul-mouthed coarse blackguard.”) The articles, for which Phillips was paid handsomely by William Randolph Hearst’s Cosmopolitan magazine, helped secure the passage of the 17th Amendment, which, to the lament of some Tea Partiers today, ended the role of state legislatures in selecting senators.

But in Fitzhugh Coyle Goldsborough, Phillips found an enemy even more formidable than Roosevelt. Goldsborough hailed from the gilded aristocracy that Phillips regarded as so destructive to America. The Goldsboroughs of Maryland were venerable. An ancestor was a delegate to the Continental Congress who just missed out being a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Another was a commander in the War of 1812 who later became a senator. Fitzhugh’s father, a doctor and Civil War veteran, relocated the family to Washington, D.C., where Fitzhugh was raised in a home a few blocks from the White House.

New stories by Zora Neale Hurston discovered

2011-01-04T16:57:00.000-08:00

At The Chronicle of Higher Education:

The three stories are important because they provide fuller insight into Hurston's engagement with urban black life. They show us that Harlem was of more than just passing interest to the author, and ask us to dig deeper into the phase of her life before she became so identified with Eatonville. The first story we found is a different, somewhat funnier version of "Book of Harlem," with the subtitle "Chapter I.," suggesting that Hurston may have envisioned it as the beginning of a longer migration tale. The second story, "Monkey Junk: A Satire on Modern Divorce," adheres to mock-biblical storytelling to satirize urban divorce, with the duped husband going back to Alabama at the end. It closes with the exclamation "Selah," an equivalent of "Amen" or "so sayeth the Lord" from the Book of Psalms and an ending that Hurston also used as a tongue-in-cheek valediction in a 1927 letter in which she expressed hope for a large automobile.

Jean Toomer and passing

2010-12-27T12:01:00.000-08:00

H. L. Gates's new Norton Critical edition of Jean Toomer's Cane: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/27/books/27cane.html

A note about Google's e-bookstore

2010-12-06T11:45:00.000-08:00

Google's e-bookstore is now online, and it provides readable online copies as well as links to independent bookstores. This is good news for many of the in-copyright books that it provides.

Note, however, that pre-1923 texts, which are generally out of copyright, are still available at http://books.google.com and Project Gutenberg. You do not have to purchase the repackaged ones through the e-bookstore. For example, Edith Wharton's early short stories can be found at Project Gutenberg for free, whereas a repackaged and printed version of the same Project Gutenberg texts through Google's e-books store costs $15.63. If you don't have a printer or want a book form of a free text, you may want to consider the printed version.

You can find links to all Wharton's stories legally available online here for free, by the way:
http://www.wsu.edu/~campbelld/wharton/shortstories.htm

Poetry, Fiction, and Drama Terms

2010-12-02T13:51:00.001-08:00

I've updated and moved the pages devoted to brief definitions of poetry, fiction, and drama terms. They have links to test-yourself quizzes, too, including one on scanning poetry.

Updates to the author sites; Sedgwick site

2010-11-29T08:49:00.000-08:00

I've updated the queries pages at the Wharton and Crane Society sites. Also, I've corrected the links on some other pages, including the Catharine Maria Sedgwick page.

Among the changes to the latter was the removal of all those links to texts in Palm (.pdb) file format at the University of Virginia e-text site. The digital formats available are multiplying, and persistent links can't be established any more.

Updates to Nella Larsen page

2010-11-24T10:35:00.001-08:00

Updates to the Nella Larsen page in preparation for next semester's English 309 course on women writers.

Updates to Charlotte Perkins Gilman page & Jewett bibliography

2010-10-07T20:03:00.000-07:00

I've made some updates to the Charlotte Perkins Gilman page and have updated the Sarah Orne Jewett bibliography.