Project MUSE®: Studies in American Naturalism - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/455
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Studies in American Naturalism.daily12026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 4 (2009) through current issueLatest Articles: Studies in American NaturalismTWOProject MUSE®Studies in American Naturalism1944-65191931-2555Latest articles in Studies in American Naturalism. Feed provided by Project MUSE®The Red Badge of Courage and the Re-Enchantment of the Civil War
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/966944
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In a 1920 letter to Ellery Sedgwick, editor of the Atlantic Monthly, Stewart P. Sherman, a prominent critic and English professor, noted of his re-reading of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage twenty-five years after its publication: "Its strangely conceived and strangely depicted hero makes a permanent place in memory and lives in the imagination. … A book that invades one in this fashion is quite beyond the capacity of a merely clever writer. It shows a power of magic and incantation" (qtd. in Hayes 77). As a poetically framed narrative steeped in figurative language and uniting forms of realism, naturalism, and impressionism, Crane's novel demonstrably exhibits its "power of magic and incantation" by
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/455/image/coversmallThe Red Badge of Courage and the Re-Enchantment of the Civil War2025-08-05text/htmlen-USThe Red Badge of Courage and the Re-Enchantment of the Civil War2025-08-052025TWOProject MUSE®1158712026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-08-05The Plot of Depletion in Edith Summers Kelley's Novel Weeds
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/966945
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Judith in red and white shone in her dark loveliness like a poppy among weeds. Something more than her beauty set her apart from the others: an ease and naturalness of movement, a freedom from constraint, a completeness of abandon to the fun and merrymaking, to which these daughters of toil in their most hectic moments could never attain. Somehow, in spite of her ancestry, she had escaped the curse of the soil, else she could never have known how to be so free, so glad, so careless and joyous.She was no longer the Judith that Jerry had married. The year and a half since the birth of the baby, which had made no noticeable change in Jerry, had left their print on her. The youthful curves of her face and body were
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/455/image/coversmallThe Plot of Depletion in Edith Summers Kelley's Novel Weeds2025-08-05text/htmlen-USThe Plot of Depletion in Edith Summers Kelley's Novel Weeds2025-08-052025TWOProject MUSE®1137062026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-08-05Naturalism, Neo-Naturalism, and the Significance of Religious Change
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/966946
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To refer to a concept as "neo" or "new" implicitly suggests an original force that has undergone, or is undergoing, revision. Recent scholarship in American literary naturalism has begun to use the terminology "neo-naturalism" or "neonaturalism" to describe literary and other artistic outputs that resonate with works associated with American literary naturalism.1 The implication being, of course, that neo-naturalism somehow reimagines the themes that so fascinated literary naturalists such as Frank Norris, Jack London, and Stephen Crane. Resonance with classical naturalism, though, does not simply mean repetition, and—to more fully understand the relationship between "classical naturalism" and neo-naturalism—a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/455/image/coversmallNaturalism, Neo-Naturalism, and the Significance of Religious Change2025-08-05text/htmlen-USNaturalism, Neo-Naturalism, and the Significance of Religious Change2025-08-052025TWOProject MUSE®1135132026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-08-05Excess and A New Pornographic Imagination: Escalations of Neonaturalism in Transnational Visual Culture: Part II: Arrival
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/966947
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Due to its subject matter, and the drastic nature of new forms of naturalism more generally, this essay contains descriptions of sexual and racist violence, explicit images, and offensive language.The first part of this essay (see Schmidt, "Excess") introduced the theoretical, historical, and visual contexts which underlie the claim that neonaturalism in transnational visual culture has been characterized by the use of the excessive and pornographic for purposes of social criticism. Part I concluded with the analysis of movies and TV series that feature escalations of sexuality and violence to dissect the sex and porn industry (see I.1.). "Part II: Arrival" will trace neonaturalist escalation strategies in genres
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/455/image/coversmallExcess and A New Pornographic Imagination: Escalations of Neonaturalism in Transnational Visual Culture: Part II: Arrival2025-08-05text/htmlen-USExcess and A New Pornographic Imagination: Escalations of Neonaturalism in Transnational Visual Culture: Part II: Arrival2025-08-052025TWOProject MUSE®2370862026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-08-05Plays: The Critical Edition by Theodore Dreiser (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/966948
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Literary scholarship has increasingly rescued forgotten works, revealing how these artifacts are socially relevant. And these discoveries have opened the canon, moving us away from traditional authors, but in the case of Theodore Dreiser, this shift has taken a surprising twist. As an America novelist, Dreiser is known as a realist, a preeminent author of long fiction, but as a playwright he has been neglected, a situation that is rectified by the latest volume in The Dreiser Edition, an authoritative collection of Dreiser's twelve plays. These brief speculative works seem the antithesis of his long novels—they are avant-garde dramas that explore existential themes.For seven years, between 1913 and 1920, Dreiser
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/455/image/coversmallPlays: The Critical Edition by Theodore Dreiser (review)2025-08-05text/htmlen-USPlays: The Critical Edition by Theodore Dreiser (review)2025-08-052025TWOProject MUSE®172692026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-08-05Sleep Fictions: Rest and Its Deprivations in Progressive-Era Literature by Hannah L. Huber (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/966949
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To sleep with the fishes, to rest in peace, "To die, to sleep—To sleep—perchance to dream": these phrases that amuse, console, and unsettle, at the shared impression of sleep's resemblance to death, also risk distorting the physical reality of sleep. Sleep is a state of life. And it often enacts a rebellious occupation of life. The tale many consider the first significant short story in the US takes the derelict idleness sleep invokes for its central plot device. Reminding readers that history comprises the discordant simultaneity of the momentous and the banal, "Rip Van Winkle" sidesteps the drama of the Revolutionary War to prioritize the incorrigible lethargy of a dawdling antihero. By virtue of his comical
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/455/image/coversmallSleep Fictions: Rest and Its Deprivations in Progressive-Era Literature by Hannah L. Huber (review)2025-08-05text/htmlen-USSleep Fictions: Rest and Its Deprivations in Progressive-Era Literature by Hannah L. Huber (review)2025-08-052025TWOProject MUSE®220212026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-08-05Vagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos: The Literature and Culture of U.S. Transiency 1890–1940 by Owen Clayton (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/966950
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When starting Owen Clayton's monograph Vagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos: The Literature and Culture of U.S. Transiency 1890–1940, readers may be concerned that Clayton has set too lofty a goal for his project. As he states, his text will both display that "the pioneer hobo image is a simplification of the era of the hobo, particularly regarding the complexity and diversity of cultural artifacts created by transient authors, poets and musicians in the early twentieth-century US" (4) and "provide new ways for American Studies scholars to think about the activity and representation of transiency" (5). This will be done by bringing a fresh, critical eye to a mixture of canonical and non-canonical "works created by
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/455/image/coversmallVagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos: The Literature and Culture of U.S. Transiency 1890–1940 by Owen Clayton (review)2025-08-05text/htmlen-USVagabonds, Tramps, and Hobos: The Literature and Culture of U.S. Transiency 1890–1940 by Owen Clayton (review)2025-08-052025TWOProject MUSE®128892026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-08-05Cartoons and Caricatures of Mark Twain in Context: Reformer and Social Critic, 1869–1910 ed. by Leslie Diane Myrick and Gary Scharnhorst (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/966951
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At the time of his death, Mark Twain was almost certainly the most famous American writer. In fact, Twain's celebrity was matched only by a handful of businessmen and politicians—he was a fixture in newspapers and weeklies for the last several decades of his life. Cartoons and Caricatures of Mark Twain in Context considers one underexplored facet of Twain's public persona, analyzing more than 70 cartoons from the late 1860s until his death in 1910. This 40+ year period saw Twain publish most of his major work, including all his novels. Obviously, this time also saw seismic shifts in U.S. political life, as the nation moved through Reconstruction and several economic panics, becoming a global military and economic
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/455/image/coversmallCartoons and Caricatures of Mark Twain in Context: Reformer and Social Critic, 1869–1910 ed. by Leslie Diane Myrick and Gary Scharnhorst (review)2025-08-05text/htmlen-USCartoons and Caricatures of Mark Twain in Context: Reformer and Social Critic, 1869–1910 ed. by Leslie Diane Myrick and Gary Scharnhorst (review)2025-08-052025TWOProject MUSE®105412026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-08-05Writing Against Reform: Aesthetic Realism in the Progressive Era by Arielle Zibrak (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/966952
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What is the relationship between literature and politics? In Writing Against Reform: Aesthetic Realism in the Progressive Era, Arielle Zibrak examines five turn-of-the-century American authors who, in different ways, protested the encroachment of the political into the literary domain. During a period of American history when numerous authors used their writing as a form of political action, the subjects of this book advocated for a literature of "ideas rather than arguments" (64). This engaging and persuasively argued study offers important insights about the value of art, generally, and the value of literary aesthetics, in particular.The Progressive Era, according to conventional periodization, spanned from
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/455/image/coversmallWriting Against Reform: Aesthetic Realism in the Progressive Era by Arielle Zibrak (review)2025-08-05text/htmlen-USWriting Against Reform: Aesthetic Realism in the Progressive Era by Arielle Zibrak (review)2025-08-052025TWOProject MUSE®114092026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-08-05Beyond Realism: Naturalist Film in Theory and Practice by Robert Singer (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/966953
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Robert Singer's new book, Beyond Realism: Naturalist Film in Theory and Practice, reads like a magnum opus: an enthusiastic and generous culmination of over three decades of Singer's scholarship on naturalism in literature and film. This new study is his most comprehensive and global to date, covering films from almost every continent, period, genre, and style. Yet the book feels less like a definitive tome than it does a conversation starter, as Singer invites readers to join him in appreciating the rawness and richness of naturalist cinema. This invitation makes the book a joy to read, although an admittedly perverse one, given the unsettling nature of the subject matter. Just when naturalist cinema seems to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-18T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/455/image/coversmallBeyond Realism: Naturalist Film in Theory and Practice by Robert Singer (review)2025-08-05text/htmlen-USBeyond Realism: Naturalist Film in Theory and Practice by Robert Singer (review)2025-08-052025TWOProject MUSE®117152026-05-18T00:00:00-05:002025-08-05