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108 pages

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Donald Pizer’s lifelong exploration of Frank Norris’s work in a single volume.

Frank Norris is a seminal figure in the history of American literary naturalism despite the brevity of his career. Frank Norris and American Naturalism brings together in one volume Donald Pizer’s lifelong exploration of the naturalist’s work, ranging from his 1955 discussion of point of view in The Octopus to his 2010 essay on the thematic unity of that novel. The essays in Frank Norris and American Naturalism as a whole seek to demonstrate both the coherence of Norris’s thought and his contribution toward the establishment of a specific form of naturalism in America. The collection’s principal focus is Norris’s most enduring works, the novels McTeague and The Octopus, though his other fiction and literary criticism are also discussed.

Preface; Editorial Note and Acknowledgments; Criticism; Introduction: The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris; Frank Norris’s Definition of Naturalism; Frank Norris and the Frontier as Popular Idea in America; Vandover and the Brute and McTeague Evolutionary Ethical Dualism in Frank Norris’s; Vandover and the Brute and McTeague; McTeague and American Naturalism; The Problem of Philosophy in the Novel; The Biological Determinism of McTeague in Our Time; Frank Norris’s McTeague : Naturalism as Popular Myth; The Popular Novels; The Masculine– Feminine Ethic in Frank Norris’s Popular Novels; The Octopus; Another Look at The Octopus; The Concept of Nature in Frank Norris’s The Octopus; Synthetic Criticism and Frank Norris: Or, Mr. Marx, Mr. Taylor and Th e Octopus; Collis P. Huntington, William S. Rainsford and the Conclusion of Frank Norris’s The Octopus; Index.

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América

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American

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Publié par	Anthem Press
Date de parution	30 mai 2018
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781783088041
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0076€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

FRANK NORRIS AND AMERICAN NATURALISM
ANTHEM NINETEENTH-CENTURY SERIES
The Anthem Nineteenth-Century Series incorporates a broad range of titles within the fields of literature and culture, comprising an excellent collection of interdisciplinary academic texts. The series aims to promote the most challenging and original work being undertaken in the field and encourages an approach that fosters connections between areas including history, science, religion and literary theory. Our titles have earned an excellent reputation for the originality and rigour of their scholarship and our commitment to high-quality production.
Series Editor
Robert Douglas-Fairhurst – University of Oxford, UK
Editorial Board
Dinah Birch – University of Liverpool, UK
Kirstie Blair – University of Stirling, UK
Archie Burnett – Boston University, USA
Christopher Decker – University of Nevada, USA
Heather Glen – University of Cambridge, UK
Linda K. Hughes – Texas Christian University, USA
Simon J. James – Durham University, UK
Angela Leighton – University of Cambridge, UK
Jo McDonagh – King’s College London, UK
Michael O’Neill – Durham University, UK
Seamus Perry – University of Oxford, UK
Clare Pettitt – King’s College London, UK
Adrian Poole – University of Cambridge, UK
Jan-Melissa Schramm – University of Cambridge, UK
FRANK NORRIS AND AMERICAN NATURALISM
Donald Pizer
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com

This edition first published in UK and USA 2018
by ANTHEM PRESS
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ISBN-13: 978-1-78308-802-7 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78308-802-8 (Hbk)

This title is also available as an e-book.
CONTENTS
Preface
Editorial Note and Acknowledgments
Criticism
Introduction: The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris
Frank Norris’s Definition of Naturalism
Frank Norris and the Frontier as Popular Idea in America
Vandover and the Brute and McTeague
Evolutionary Ethical Dualism in Frank Norris’s Vandover and the Brute and McTeague
McTeague and American Naturalism
The Problem of Philosophy in the Novel
The Biological Determinism of McTeague in Our Time
Frank Norris’s McTeague : Naturalism as Popular Myth
The Popular Novels
The Masculine–Feminine Ethic in Frank Norris’s Popular Novels
The Octopus
Another Look at The Octopus
The Concept of Nature in Frank Norris’s The Octopus
Synthetic Criticism and Frank Norris: Or, Mr. Marx, Mr. Taylor and The Octopus
Collis P. Huntington, William S. Rainsford and the Conclusion of Frank Norris’s The Octopus
Index
Preface
Both as a Californian (though, like Norris, not a native of the state) and a student of American literary naturalism, I was always interested in Frank Norris’s work. Indeed, one of my earliest publications was an essay on The Octopus , which appeared in 1955 when I was still a UCLA graduate student. It was not, however, until I completed and then revised my dissertation on Hamlin Garland for publication in the late 1950s that I gave full attention to Norris, an effort that resulted in a number of essays and that culminated in two books, The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris (1964), an edition, and The Novels of Frank Norris (1966), a critical study. Although I occasionally wrote about Norris in the three decades that followed, especially in essays devoted to naturalism in general, I was principally preoccupied during this period with the writings of Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser and John Dos Passos. Since the late 1990s, however, I have again given Norris’s work a good deal of attention, concentrating on prominent issues in the interpretation of McTeague and The Octopus .
As I note in several of the essays that follow, Norris has not been taken seriously by most scholars of American literature. His early death at 32 was much lamented at the time, but soon afterward it became common to place his work in various pigeonholes that had the effect of prejudicing any interest in its possible depth or quality. Although his playful self-designation as the “Boy Zola” in several of his letters did not directly influence the deterioration of his early reputation, both his youth and his enthusiasm for Zola were nevertheless well known and their implications played a major role in its decline. In the conventional reading of Norris’s work that soon arose and still persists, Norris had full-heartedly seized upon Zolaesque naturalism as his principal form of expression and thereby doomed his novels to the mediocrity characteristic of an immature acceptance of a simplistic and inadequate interpretation of existence. This dismissal was later endorsed by the tendency in most histories of American literature to consider late nineteenth-century American naturalism in general an unproductive (but fortunately brief!) moment in this history, with Norris the best example of the thinness of the movement. 1
Norris’s critical reputation was thus at a low ebb when I first developed an interest in his work in the late 1950s. He had always attracted general readers by the vibrancy of his best novels (what is traditionally known as his “power”), but academic criticism maintained that this fictional appeal could not disguise the shallowness and confusion of his themes. There were few exceptions to this judgment, the most notable being Charles C. Walcutt in his landmark study American Literary Naturalism, A Divided Stream , which appeared in 1956. Walcutt stressed in his examination of Norris and other naturalists of his period their divided allegiance both to the mechanistic scientism of their age and to elements of early nineteenth-century American transcendentalism. Walcutt went astray, I believe, in holding that this largely unconsciously pursued “divided stream” led to the naturalists’ inability to create a form expressive of their basic beliefs, but he nevertheless was hugely influential in suggesting the movement’s native roots as well as its possession of a greater complexity of theme than was conventionally acknowledged.
My own early research on the source of Norris’s ideas and the form of his fiction was thus closely related to Walcutt’s basic insight, though I in fact had noted the transcendental element in The Octopus in my 1955 essay before his book appeared. In general, I was at pains in those essays of the late 1950s and early 1960s to demonstrate that Norris was a kind of closet intellectual. His initial two novels, I argued, are deeply indebted both to the significant efforts by various late nineteenth-century scientists to describe hitherto neglected diseases of the mind and body and to the attempt by prominent American philosophers of the period to reconcile science and traditional belief within an evolutionary theistic philosophy. I was seeking through this research not merely to discover the sources of Norris’s beliefs but their underlying coherence in relation to the thinking of his time. My attempt was similar to that of scholars of the so-called Dark Ages, who have revealed that this period is obscure principally to those who do not make an effort to study it closely. In a like manner, I was attempting to explain that Norris’s ideas appear to lack coherence principally because they derive from various systems of belief that are today only vaguely or inadequately understood.
Much of this early work deals with Norris’s three most compelling and frequently read novels, Vandover and the Brute , McTeague and The Octopus , though I was also drawn to his often neglected literary criticism and popular novels because of their important role in making even clearer the themes present in these novels. (For some reason not fully evident to me, I have never written on his last novel, The Pit , except for the obligatory chapter in my The Novels of Frank Norris .) More recently, I have narrowed down my interest to McTeague and The Octopus —the works on which his permanent reputation will undoubtedly rest. In the essays on McTeague , I explore aspects of Norris’s fascination with the animal vestiges of man’s evolutionary heritage, while the essay on The Octopus refines and expands on my earlier efforts to describe the complex body of ideas underlying that often misinterpreted novel.
My effort throughout my work on Norris has been threefold: to establish his firm relationship to American thought of his own time, to describe the consistency both of his general scheme of ideas and of their representation in specific works and to demonstrate how he seeks (not always successfully) to manifest these ideas in his fiction. 2 These efforts have exposed two major ironies at the