Literary Movements

Usually in the realms of literature and the arts each major movement can be seen as a rebellion against whatever came before it, so Romanticism upstages Classicism, only to be done in in turn by Realism as people weary of the excesses of one style only to rush headlong into the excesses of its opposite. But sometimes it happens that one style is replaced by an even more extreme version of itself, as was the case when Realism in literature and the visual arts was replaced in the late 19th- and early 20th-centuries by Naturalism, a movement that was inspired by adaptation of the principles and methods of natural science, especially the Darwinian view of nature. One of the most perfect examples of this movement is Jack London's short story "To Build A Fire", published in The Century Magazine in 1908 with its themes of the fragility of human survival and the ways in which we as humans are defined by the ways in which we are at odds with the rest of nature. (A more "juvenalized" version had been published previously, but it is the 1908 version that is now considered to be the definitive one.) (http://sunside.berkeley.edu).

In literature, Naturalism extended the tradition of realism, aiming at an even more faithful, unselective representation of reality. It is not coincidental that the rise of Naturalism should follow the rise of photography as an artform (and as a technological possibility), for both photography and naturalism (whether in literature or in the visual arts) attempt

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mortality and man's place in the universe. Fifty degrees below zero stood for a bite of frost that hurt and that must be guarded against by the use of mittens, ear-flaps, warm moccasins, and thick socks. Fifty degrees below zero was to him just precisely fifty degrees below zero. That there should be anything more to it than that was a thought that never entered his head (http://sunside.berkeley.edu). Although many of the greatest Naturalist artists were Americans, the school actually originated in France, with Emile Zola championing and perfecting the style and the associated literary philosophy (Gair 38). Like Zola, London would become not simply an observer, content to record phenomena, but rather an intentionally detached experimenter who subjects his (or her - although Naturalism was a field dominated by men) characters and their passions to a series of tests, working with emotional and social facts as a chemist works with matter. We see this again and again throughout "To Build a Fire" - the moment things seems to be going just the smallest degree better for our protagonist, London throws something else awful at him. Despite their claim to complete objectivity, the literary naturalists were handicapped by certain biases

Category: Literature - L