Parnassushome

Naturalism. . Choose one collection to read.

November/December - Reading Selections

Naturalists 1890-1910

Collection 1

Maggie: Girl of the Streets by Stephen Crane. "Crane's first novel is the tale of a pretty young slum girl driven to brutal excesses by poverty and loneliness. It was considered so sexually frank and realistic, that the book had to be privately printed at first. It was eventually hailed as the first genuine expression of Naturalism in American letters and established its creator as the American apostle of an artistic revolution which was to alter the shape and destiny of civilization itself."http://www.online-literature.com/crane/maggie/

Read from Paul Reuben's site. MLA Style Citation of this Web Page Reuben, Paul P. "Chapter 6: Late Nineteenth Century: Naturalism - A Brief Introduction." PAL: Perspectives in American Literature- A Research and Reference Guide. URL:http://www.csustan.edu/english/reuben/pal/chap6/6intro.html

40 copies of this book are available for sign-out from Mr. Jollymore

Collection 2

The Jungle, Upton Sinclair. Sinclair's own words from Cosmopolitan, October, 1906. "I wrote with tears and anguish, pouring into the pages all that pain which life had meant to me. Externally the story had to do with a family of stockyard workers, but internally it was the story of my own family. Did I wish to know how the poor suffered in winter time in Chicago? I only had to recall the previous winter in the cabin, when we had only cotton blankets, and had rags on top of us. It was the same with hunger, with illness, with fear. Our little boy was down with pneumonia that winter, and nearly died, and the grief of that went into the book." http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jupton.htm

Excerpt from The Jungle: " It was only when the whole ham was spoiled that it came into the department of Elzbieta. Cut up by the two-thousand-revolutions-a-minute flyers, and mixed with half a ton of other meat, no odor that ever was in a ham could make any difference. There was never the least attention paid to what was cut up for sausage; there would come all the way back from Europe old sausage that had been rejected, and that was moldy and white - it would be dosed with borax and glycerine, and dumped into the hoppers, and made over again for home consumption" .http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/Jupton.htm

Collection 3

An American Tragedy, Theodore Drieser. "An American Tragedy is a detailed portrayal of the dark side of the American Dream—the story of what can happen when an ordinary man's desire for wealth and status overwhelms his moral sense. Dreiser built the novel around a real-life crime after spending years researching incidents in which men murdered women with whom they had been romantically involved but who had become inconvenient for one reason or another (often because of an unwanted pregnancy, as in the novel). Dreiser chose as his starting point the case of Chester Gillette, who drowned his pregnant girlfriend in a New York lake in 1906. Like the novel's Clyde Griffiths, Chester Gillette was electrocuted for his crime." http://www.enotes.com/american-tragedy/