The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism ed. by Keith Newlin (review)

Review Editor's note: we have not reviewed this book in Studies in American Naturalism previously because of a sense of conflict: its editor is our co-editor and many of its contributors are our regular contributors and members of our editorial board. So we left the Handbook to be reviewed elsewhere, trusting it to stand on its merits. The detailed review essay below, by an international scholar of literary naturalism, is written from an international perspective and directed primarily at international scholars. It was not only interesting to us to see what an international reader makes of it; we also found the larger perspective the reviewer offers on the expanding scope and influence of literary naturalism on writers and scholars alike bracing. We offer it here in the hope that our readers, domestic and international, will find its larger view of that scope and influence matter for thought.

This book opens up a panorama of American literary naturalism from its beginnings in the 1890s to the present. The leading figures, Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London, are here, surrounded by a host of authors linked by narrative technique or by ideology to a mode of presenting life in all its vagaries and the complexities of human actions and failures. Reading it one is reminded that the critics dedicated to the study of naturalism likewise form a closely knit web headed by the leading theorists of the movement, Charles Child Walcutt and Donald Pizer, who have contributed significantly to defining the ideological and historical background and to establishing the different phases of naturalist writing. Critical interest in American literary naturalism gained momentum in the 1960s, and the past fifty years have seen new biographies and new, complete, and unabridged editions of the canonical authors. But though author societies such as the Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Hamlin Garland, Jack London, Frank Norris, Edith Wharton, and Richard Wright societies meet regularly at the annual conferences of the American Literature Association and also intermittently on special occasions such as centennials of publication of major works, naturalism is still frequently subsumed under the label American realism, or it is presented as a short-lived development along the historical path between realism and modernism. A careful reading of the Oxford Handbook suggests, however, that American naturalism can no longer be confined to what is now called the first or classic period from 1890 to 1915. Rather, literary naturalism is an ongoing movement and mode of writing employed by American authors up to the present day, and the work of scholars of American naturalism touches on the most pertinent current debates in the study of American literary history.

The Oxford Handbook both reminds us that the movement has had continuing impact on American letters and fills a gap in the scholarship. Even though there are numerous studies in American naturalism that cover a range of important topics from determinism, regionalism, modernity, (anti-)aesthetics, and gender issues to historically oriented studies on the 19th and 20th centuries, all these works provide, as the editor says, "only a partial picture," and one might add, while still helpful, quite a few are somewhat dated in their approach. There has long been need for a comprehensive treatment of the subject both topically and thematically. The scope of the Handbook is ambitious: an introduction plus twenty-eight essays arranged in six groups and presented in a systematic order, partly chronological, partly thematic, and partly generic. Some of the essays might have functioned in other contexts and there are overlapping passages and some redundancies and gaps, but the overall effect is of thorough, reliable, and competent information; readers will emerge acquainted with the major naturalist writers, poets, and playwrights of an entire century and informed about their objectives and methods and influence. As a milestone in studies of American naturalism, the Handbook deserves a space in the student's or scholar's library.

The Handbook...