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A young woman who fails to escape the poverty and violence of her childhood surroundings and becomes a prostitute, another young woman who spectacularly rises to stardom on the New York theatre stage, a greedy dentist who ends up being handcuffed to a corpse in the middle of Death Valley, and a Californian pet dog who joins a pack of wolves in Alaska: the plots and themes of some of the most famous works of (North) American literary naturalism (Stephen Crane’s Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, Frank Norris’s McTeague, and Jack London’s The Call of the Wild, respectively) are nothing short of epic, sensationalist, and melodramatic – and thus do not fit the conventional critical characterization of literary naturalism as a subset of realism at all. In this lecture, we will review traditional and revisionist critical approaches to literary naturalism and examine both canonical and less frequently read works of naturalism from the U.S. and Canada (including French Canada). In addition, we will also take a look at early adaptations and translations of literary naturalism, including D.W. Griffith’s A Corner in Wheat (1909) and some of the various German translations of Frank Norris’s The Octopus (1904/1954). |
