naturalism
naturalism,as a term of literary history, primarily a French movement in prose fiction and (to a lesser extent) the drama during the final third of the 19th cent., although it is also applied to similar movements or groups of writers in other countries (e.g. Germany, the USA) in the latter decades of the 19th and early years of the 20th cents. In France Zola was the dominant practitioner of naturalism in prose fiction and the chief exponent of its doctrines. His novel Thérèse Raquin ( 1867 ), together with the Goncourts ' Germinie Lacerteux ( 1865 ), are considered as marking the beginnings of the movement; its most substantial and important achievement in fiction is the series of 20 novels written by Zola between 1871 and 1893 under the general title of Les Rougon-Macquart. Other writers who shared, in a greater or lesser degree, the ideas and aims of naturalism are Daudet , Maupassant and, in his early...
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