This chapter traces naturalism, a radical outgrowth of realism and one of the earliest movements in modernist theatre, beginning with its first articulations by Émile Zola and his French contemporaries through to manifestations, variations, and subversions of naturalist ideas across Europe, the United States, China, and India. Based in scientific epistemologies and a rejection of aesthetic idealism, naturalism introduced still potent innovations in dramatic form, scenography, audience experience, and the division of labour in theatre. Through confronting depictions of character and agency as fundamentally shaped by physiological, hereditary, and environmental forces, naturalism paved the way for later reformist theatre while seeding subsequent modernist movements that rebelled against its physicalist and materialist accounts of human experience.

In Schoenberg’s Vienna the theatre, more so than music, was central to cultural discourse; unsurprisingly, opera and musical drama interested Schoenberg from early on, and he returned to dramatic genres repeatedly throughout his compositional career. In surveying the lively and varied theatrical life of Vienna around 1900 and after, this chapter examines shifting trends in modernist drama – including changing fashions in staging and set design – alongside the influence of significant authors, artists and innovators. It locates the Viennese stage as a site for cultural exchange with other major European centres, and ultimately argues that, if written from the perspective of the theatre, the history of Viennese musical modernism would look quite different from the story of post-tonal progress that has dominated our narratives of Schoenberg’s creative trajectory.

This chapter takes up Zola’s self-portrait as Saint Thomas in the wake of his much-commented visit to Lourdes in 1892. The novel he went on to write about the Pyrenean shrine, ‘that divine land of dreams’, was largely based on those supposedly miraculous events he had witnessed, and about which he remained sceptical. This chapter looks to Zola’s Lourdes (1894), in conjunction with the heated polemic it provoked, to better understand the stakes of the author’s divisive foray into matters of Catholic practice and dogma. More than an expression of Zola’s anti-clericalism, the novel aroused debates that were aesthetic as much as ideological, as adversaries argued over questions of representation, proofs, facts, documents, and faithfulness. The chapter reads a set of material penned by Catholic detractors, who were determined to defend the divine status of the miracle, casting Zola’s naturalism as an illegitimate, unbelievable – even, à la limite, idealist – aesthetic mode.

This chapter engages with an important tradition of Marxist literary criticism – principally via Fredric Jameson – that has insisted on the insufficiencies of the naturalist novel as a vehicle for revolutionary impulses. It takes up Jameson’s claims as a spur to reconsidering the contested politics of Zola’s best-selling strike novel Germinal (1885). The chapter conceives of the strike as a particular vehicle for the idealist imagination that Zola obsessively discredits – casting it as a form of ‘impossibilism’, an epithet applied to the earliest manifestation of French Marxism. Embedded in contemporary schisms on the Left, Zola’s strike novel is shown to negotiate with debates about the ethical and political legitimacy of this weapon of working-class struggle, as well as the figure of the ambitious strike leader. Zola’s critical account of political idealism ultimately entails a set of anxious reflections on the naturalist novel’s own modes of representation, as well as its equivocal sense of political purpose.

This chapter tackles Zola’s incongruous experiment in Le Rêve (1888) with an ‘idealist’ style of fiction. Generally understood as a strategic demonstration of the author’s versatility, Le Rêve also responds to a longstanding negotiation with the language of idealism – one rooted, the chapter argues, in Zola’s complex relationship to the century’s most prominent idealist writer, George Sand. The chapter reads Le Rêve as effectuating a return to Sand’s aesthetic, which Zola had assimilated into the troublesome figure of the dream. It tracks the burgeoning imagination of Zola’s heroine via Freud’s ‘Family Romances’, then via Marthe Robert’s Freudian genealogy of the novel, which together reveal the mutual entailments of authorial creativity and childhood fantasy. Zola’s roman d’artiste emerges as another projection of idealist tendencies onto women – most obviously, Sand, but also the artist-heroine of Le Rêve, who is made to embody Sand’s congenital extravagance.

The Introduction makes the case for privileging idealism in our accounts of Zola’s thought and writing, and, in turn for recovering the fundamental role it plays as a cornerstone of naturalism’s self-image. Exploring naturalism’s relationship to its chief antagonist can open up new perspectives on two thorny critical questions. First, how to grapple with the gap between naturalist theory, in all its dogmatism, and the experimental, even contradictory, nature of naturalist writing in practice. Second, how to make sense of Zola’s own eventual destination as the author of utopian novels (1899-1902), where the rhetoric of idealism, of the dream, surfaces as the best expression of the writer’s political commitment. Against prevailing accounts of Zola’s ‘late’ fiction as a product of subterranean, emotional, or instinctual impulses, the Introduction reframes Zola’s idealism as a strategic political and intellectual project.

This chapter charts the long history of what Zola dubbed ‘the quarrel of the idealists and the naturalists’. In its wide-ranging account of a shifting literary field in the last two decades of the nineteenth century, the chapter shows how naturalism came to be defined by its double-edged relationship to its chief adversary: idealism. It sets out some of the key charges that Zola formulated against idealism, as the means to justify naturalism’s ethical, political, and aesthetic superiority. Then, in looking to Zola’s contemporaries, it examines a strain of literary criticism that sought to trouble the binaries Zola established - notably, by claiming to determine an idealist tendency in the naturalist author’s own writing , albeit ‘à rebours’. The remainder of the chapter describes the so-called idealist reaction that took hold in the late 1880s, forcing Zola to contemplate ways of adapting to the demands of a younger generation.

The Dubliners stories arose from a chance opportunity when George Russell, a prominent revivalist figure, invited Joyce to make a little money by submitting stories to The Irish Homestead. Russell didn’t want the readers to be disconcerted – but that would precisely be the effect of Joyce’s stories. Eventually published ten years later, having overcome threats of censorship and libel law, the expanded collection made a significant intervention in the Irish Literary Revival, pointing unerringly at some unpleasant truths and establishing Joyce as a noted prose realist who disrupted a movement more associated with poets and dramatists. These stories would later come to be seen also as key documents in the development of modernist fiction, their naturalism tempered by symbolism and a multi-layered interpretative openness that makes them among the most prized of modern short stories.

This chapter offers an account of literature’s intervention in the money debates of the early twentieth-century United States. It explores the corrosive effects of banking crises and the fear of corrupt trusts through the realist anti-banking novels of writers such as Upton Sinclair; the persistent social shibboleths of gold versus paper money in the naturalism of Edith Wharton and Frank Norris; the teleological failures of speculation depicted in the caricatures of F. Scott Fitzgerald; and the possibilities and limitations of the crisis that precipitated the New Deal, as suggested by the fiction of Zora Neale Hurston. The chapter also explores, through the writing of Mina Loy, the alternative money debates that were receiving increased attention in this period.

This chapter traces the development of an economic sublime associated with modern neoclassical economics. A precursor to Fredric Jameson’s postmodern “hysterical sublime,” the sublimity of neoclassical economics derived from the thrilling sense that, through math, economics could access vast and terrifying universal forces, and connect individuals directly to them. However, the most popular expression of the economic sublime was not mathematical but literary, and consisted primarily of naturalist novels that chronicled human encounters with economic laws allegedly so regular, universal, and inexorable that they amounted to a new branch of physics. Through readings of novels by Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, and Frank Norris, this chapter shows how literature helped train readers to understand neoclassical economics not just as natural, but also as an indispensable source of romantic pleasure.

This chapter considers Heidegger’s “two-handedness” on the issue of realism versus idealism: on the one hand, an apparent realism about entities, while on the other, an apparent idealism about being. Interpreters tend to resolve the tensions such two-handedness engenders by giving one side or the other the upper hand. Kantian approaches to Heidegger privilege idealism, other readings favor realism. The latter readings neglect Heidegger’s own rather mocking remarks directed at those who fear idealism as “the foul fiend incarnate” and favor instead what he calls a “blind realism.” Properly understood, such remarks point toward a position beyond both realism and idealism, a position akin to, but importantly different from, Quine’s naturalism. Quine’s imagery of “working from within” and “mutual containment” provide models for a more evenhanded approach to the issue of realism and idealism. Moreover, they help us to understand Heidegger’s principal aim of rejecting both positions.

Starting with George Lukacs’ complaint that naturalist works are incoherent because of their superfluous detail, this chapter argues that incoherence was in fact an effective literary aesthetic for seeing and managing details at a large scale. The large scale that was particularly salient to American naturalism was the global one of American imperial expansion during the Progressive Era, and the essay argues that American empire is a useful framework for understanding naturalism as a literary movement because it brought together an investment in incoherent form with statistical and biopolitical technologies that, like naturalist works, proliferated details. Naturalism in this American context isn’t a failed version of realism. Nor does its incoherence register an inability to represent empire as an emergent global order. Instead, naturalism developed the realist project with a set of conventions that powerfully (and problematically) expressed the form of an emerging and efficacious large-scale global order.

Nineteenth-century debates over realism were particularly intense in France, where they were part of a struggle against the dominance of classical idealism. These debates, and the major realist literary works of the period, largely focused on metropolitan areas, often Paris itself. From Balzac onwards, however, several strands of French realism sought to embed storytelling in dense description whose signification, branching out through metonymy, often included connections with the French colonies. So-called realist writers, meanwhile, often also wrote ‘exotic’ texts in which they sought to problematize the nature of realism itself or apply a realist gaze to the wider world. Realism’s later variant, naturalism, portrays characters whose behavior is largely determined by materialist, predominantly biological factors. While it generally focuses on specific metropolitan milieux, naturalism was a source of inspiration for colonial literature from the 1880s onwards. Realist observation can serve as a tool for political writing of many kinds and remains a resource drawn on by later writers, including postcolonial Francophone authors.

The chapter starts with an impasse in criminal justice theory between liberal normative and critical historical accounts to consider a new way of developing critique. This is based on the idea of human beings as metaphysical animals, that is, animals capable of thought and love. Starting with Bernard Williams’s account of the ‘peculiar’ nature of modern ethics, a moral psychology based on a naturalistic understanding of what human beings are would be a better way of thinking about what it means to violate or be violated by another. Basing our understanding of violation on what it means to be human takes us to ontology and to ontological critique as a pivotal moment in a sequence of four critiques, moving from immanent to explanatory to ontological and then to emancipatory. This provides the possibility of a further ethically real/ institutionally critical (ERIC) position which brings together ontological naturalism, ethical realism and institutional critique. How love was identified as the immanent starting point for the argument is explained. The upshot of this fivefold form of critique is a move in the course of the book away from punishment and towards what I call a deep or tendential abolitionist position.

This chapter examines the unstable intellectual situation of Marx’s Paris Manuscripts, in which an abstract conception of the Hegelian subject–object that had allegedly been naturalized by Feuerbach into the pair human–nature jostles, on the one hand, with a recognition on Marx’s part of a historical dimension lacking in Feuerbach but which had already been present in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and, on the other, with an emerging familiarity with radical politics. Marx’s conception of the human as Gattungswesen, the basis of a communism that as fully developed naturalism equals humanism, and as fully developed humanism equals naturalism, is still indebted to that of Feuerbach. At the same time, he is developing his own conception of the human that resolutely carries Aristotle’s theory of soul through into the case of rational soul where Aristotle himself suffered a failure of nerve.

Experimental physiology was exploited as a metaphor and a model for the work of authors and critics. The final two chapters advance the book’s trajectory which takes in increasingly diverse literary forms and traces how vivisection became loosened from its ethical and political contexts. Chapter 7 studies how Émile Zola and August Strindberg drew up principles of naturalism by fashioning themselves as literary vivisectors and presenting the stage and the novel as sites of experimentation. They did so by interrogating the connection between observation and intervention and by cultivating an attitude of objective absence imported from experimental physiology. By reframing their works within the context of the vivisection debates (to which naturalism was deeply indebted), the chapter offers a reconsideration of how these writers sought to uncover physiological and psychological laws that would make literature entirely scientific.

This chapter explains how the distinction between physical and metaphysical cosmologies contributed to the rise of modern democracy. Ezrahi argues that the division of Nature from God and Culture has created a space for human agency and democratic practices. This dichotomy has also facilitated the alliance between science and democracy, with science gaining authority in representing Nature in relation to societal norms. The text further discusses the imposition of Western cosmologies on non-Western societies under the guise of modernization. It references the work of anthropologist Philippe Descola, who categorizes cosmologies based on configurations of physicalities and interiorities, identifying four types: totemism, analogism, animism, and naturalism. The chapter also explores how these different cosmologies manifest in various societies globally. It emphasizes the transformative impact of modern science on societal beliefs and commonsense, highlighting the role of encyclopedias and dictionaries in this transformation process. The global influence of Western science and technology is also discussed, particularly their perceived neutrality and universality. It also notes how different cosmologies often borrow elements from each other, often stripped of their original context. Lastly, it touches upon the presence of animism in Western childhood culture.