Frank Norris and American Naturalism

by Donald Pizer

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781783088027
Publisher:	Anthem Press
Publication date:	05/30/2018
Series:	Anthem Nineteenth-Century Series
Pages:	156
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Donald Pizer has had a distinguished career as a critic and editor of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature and as an interpreter of the history and nature of American literary naturalism. Among his most well-known works are Realism and Naturalism in Late Nineteenth Century American Literature and The Theory and Practice of American Literary Naturalism. Pizer’s books about Frank Norris include a critical study The Novels of Frank Norris and editions of The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris and McTeague; he has also edited the Library of America volume, Frank Norris: Novels and Essays.

Table of 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 Th e Octopus; Collis P. Huntington, William S. Rainsford and the Conclusion of Frank Norris’s The Octopus; Index.

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

“As a collection of Pizer’s most significant essays on Norris, Frank Norris and American Naturalism gathers in one place a cluster of essays that reminds us of why Norris is worth studying in the first place—and then goes on to demonstrate an admirably lucid and captivating approach to Norris’s major novels and literary criticism.”
—Keith Newlin, Professor, Department of English, University of North Carolina Wilmington, USA

Editorial Reviews

Consistently embracing and interrogating the complexity that makes literature so compelling, Pizer’s critical work, like the fiction of Norris, occupies an indisputable place of prominence in our understanding of literary naturalism and American literature, and this volume reminds us why. —John Dudley, Studies in American Naturalism, Winter 2019, Vol. 14, No. 2

From the Publisher