Naturalism - theory

 Realism turned into naturalism under the influence of the theories of Darwin, Marx and Freud. It believed in determinism.

Naturalism is a literary expression of determinism. Associated with bleak, realistic depictions of lower-class life, determinism denies religion as a motivating force in the world and instead perceives the universe as a machine. Eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers had also imagined the world as a machine, but as a perfect one, invented by God and tending toward progress and human betterment. Naturalists imagined society as a blind machine, godless and out of control.

Stephen Crane, the son of a clergyman, put the loss of God most succinctly: 

A man said to the universe: 

"Sir, I exist!"

"However," replied the universe, 

"The fact has not created in me

A sense of obligation." 

 Like Romanticism, naturalism first appeared in Europe. It is usually traced to the works of Honoré de Balzac in the 1840s and seen as a French literary movement associated with Gustave Flaubert, Edmond and Jules Goncourt, Èmile Zola, and Guy de Maupassant. It addressed the dark issues of modern society, such as divorce, sex, adultery, poverty, and crime.

STEPHEN CRANE (1871-1900) started as a journalist. He became famous for his short stories "The Open Boat," "The Blue Hotel," and "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky". He was also the first writer to write an impressionist novel about the Civil War: The Red Badge of Courage. His last novel Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893) is one of the earliest naturalistic novels. 

JACK LONDON (1876-1916) became famous after the publication of his first collection of stories, The Son of the Wolf (1900), set in the Klondike region of Alaska and the Canadian Yukon. Other of his best-known books include The Call of the Wild (1903) and The Sea-Wolf (1904) which made him the best-paid writer in the United States of his time. 

THEODORE DREISER (1871-1945) as well as Crane and London, explores the dangers of the American dream, especially in his most famous novel An American Tragedy.