American Naturalism and the Jews examines the unabashed anti-Semitism of five notable American naturalist novelists otherwise known for their progressive social values. Hamlin Garland, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser all pushed for social improvements for the poor and oppressed, while Edith Wharton and Willa Cather both advanced the public status of women. But they all also expressed strong prejudices against the Jewish race and faith throughout their fiction, essays, letters, and other writings, producing a contradiction in American literary history that has stymied scholars and, until now, gone largely unexamined. In this breakthrough study, Donald Pizer confronts this disconcerting strain of anti-Semitism pervading American letters and culture, illustrating how easily prejudice can coexist with even the most progressive ideals.Pizer shows how these writers' racist impulses represented more than just personal biases, but resonated with larger social and ideological movements within American culture. Anti-Semitic sentiment motivated such various movements as the western farmers' populist revolt and the East Coast patricians' revulsion against immigration, both of which Pizer discusses here. This antagonism toward Jews and other non-Anglo-Saxon ethnicities intersected not only with these authors' social reform agendas but also with their literary method of representing the overpowering forces of heredity, social or natural environment, and savage instinct.

American Naturalism and the Jews: Garland, Norris, Dreiser, Wharton, and Cather

Literature & Fiction

Pizer, Donald

History & Criticism

University of Illinois Press

Crane's classic novel of Henry Fleming's coming of age in the midst of battle is accompanied by interpretive commentaries

The Red Badge of Courage: An Authoritative Text, Backgrounds and Sources, Criticism (Norton Critical Editions)

CRANE, STEPHEN

Beatty, Richmond Croom

Bradley, Sculley

Long, E. Hudson

Genre Fiction

W.W. Norton & Co., Inc.

Introduction by Robert W. Stallman

The Red Badge of Courage

Norton

This is an anthology of American realist authors active at the end of the nineteenth century.

American thought and writing: The 1890's (Riverside editions, A125)

Houghton/Mifflin

The Cambridge Companion to American Realism and Naturalism

Cambridge University Press

Literary Masters: Theodore Dreiser (LITERARY MASTERS SERIES)

Gale/Cengage Learning

American Expatriate Writing and the Paris Moment: Modernism and Place (Modernist Studies)

Politics & Social Sciences

Social Sciences

Louisiana State Univ Pr

Montparnasse and its café life, the shabby working-class area of the place de la Contrescarpe and the Pantheon, the small restaurants and cafés along the Seine, and the Right Bank world of the well-to-do . . . for American writers self-exiled to Paris during the 1920s and 1930s, the French capital represented what their homeland could not: a milieu that, through the freedom of thought and action it permitted and the richness of life it offered, nurtured the full expression of the creative imagination. How these expatriates interpreted and gave modernist shape to the myth of “the Paris moment” in their writing is the altogether fresh focus of Donald Pizer’s study of seven of their major works.
Pizer elucidates a striking difference between the genres of expatriate autobiography and fiction, and arranges his discussion accordingly. He first examines Ernest Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, Gertrude Stein’s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, and The Diary of Anaïs Nin, 1931–1934, all of which depict the emergence and triumph of the creative imagination within the Paris context. He then turns to Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, John Dos Passos’ Nineteen-Nineteen, and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, which dramatize the tragic potential in seeking a richness and intensity of creative expression within the city’s setting. Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, a relatively late example of American expatriate writing, constitutes a synthesis of the two tendencies, Pizer shows.
Through careful readings of the texts, Pizer identifies both the common threads in the expatriates’ response to the Paris moment and the distinctive expression each work gives to their shared experience. Most important, he addresses the neglected question of how the portrayal of the Paris scene helps shape a specific work’s themes and form. He traces such experimental devices as fragmented or cubistic narrative forms, the dramatic representation of consciousness, and sexual explicitness, and explores the powerful and evocative tropes of mobility and feeding.
As Pizer demonstrates, Paris between the two world wars was for the American expatriates more than a geographical entity. It was a state of mind, an experience, that engendered the formal expression of a personal aesthetic. The engaging and significant interplay between artist, place, and innovative self-reflexive forms composes, Pizer maintains, the most distinctive contribution of expatriate writing to the literary movement called high modernism.

LSU Press

Scorned by critics since birth, decreed dead by many, naturalism, according to Donald Pizer, is one of the most persistent and vital strains in American fiction, perhaps the only modern literary form in America that has been both popular and significant.” To define naturalism and explain its tenacious hold throughout the twentieth century on the American creative imagination, Pizer explores six novels: James T. Farrell’s Studs Lonigan, John Dos Passos’s U.S.A., John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness, and Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March. Pizer’s approach to these novels is empirical; he does not wrench each novel awkwardly until it fits his framework of generalizations and principles; rather, he approaches the novels as fiction and arrives at his definition through his close reading of the works. Establishing the background of naturalism, Pizer explains that it comes under attack because it is sordid and sensational in subject matter,” it challenges man’s faith in his innate moral sense and thus his responsibility for his actions,” and it is so full of social documentation” that it is often dismissed as little more than a photographic record of a life or an era; thus the aesthetic validity of the naturalistic novel has often been questioned.” Pizer posits the 1890s, the 1930s, and the late 1940s as the decades when naturalism flourished in America. He concentrates on literary criticism, not on the philosophy of naturalism, to show that literary criticism can make a contribution to a particularly muddled area of literary historya naturalism that is alive and changing, thus resisting the neat definitions reserved for the dead.

Twentieth-Century American Literary Naturalism: An Interpretation (A Chicago Classic)

United States

Southern Illinois University Press

The 1966 edition of this book has become a standard work. In this new, revised edition, Pizer has dropped three chapters and has refined and extended the work by adding six: American Literary Naturalism: An Approach Through Form,” American Literary Naturalism: The Example of Dreiser,” The Problem of Philosophy in the Naturalistic Novel,” Hamlin Garland’s 1891 Main-Travelled Roads: Local Color as Art,” Jack London: The Problem of Form,” and Dreiser’s Nigger Jeff’: The Development of an Aesthetic.”
The book contains definitions of realism and naturalism based on representative novels of the period ranging from Howells’ Rise of Silas Lapham to Crane’s Red Badge of Courage; analyses of the literary criticism of the age, stressing that of Howells, Garland, and Norris; and close readings of specific works by major figures of the period.

Realism and Naturalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Crosscurrents Modern Critiques)

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