Frank Norris and American Naturalism

Donald Pizer has had a distinguished career as a critic and editor of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature and as an interpreter of the history and nature of American literary naturalism. Among his most well-known works are Realism and Naturalism in Late Nineteenth Century American Literature and The Theory and Practice of American Literary Naturalism. Pizer’s books about Frank Norris include a critical study The Novels of Frank Norris and editions of The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris and McTeague; he has also edited the Library of America volume, Frank Norris: Novels and Essays.

• Preface; Editorial Note and Acknowledgments; Criticism; Introduction: The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris; Frank Norris’s Definition of Naturalism; Frank Norris and the Frontier as Popular Idea in America; Vandover and the Brute and McTeague Evolutionary Ethical Dualism in Frank Norris’s; Vandover and the Brute and McTeague; McTeague and American Naturalism; The Problem of Philosophy in the Novel; The Biological Determinism of McTeague in Our Time; Frank Norris’s McTeague : Naturalism as Popular Myth; The Popular Novels; The Masculine– Feminine Ethic in Frank Norris’s Popular Novels; The Octopus; Another Look at The Octopus; The Concept of Nature in Frank Norris’s The Octopus; Synthetic Criticism and Frank Norris: Or, Mr. Marx, Mr. Taylor and Th e Octopus; Collis P. Huntington, William S. Rainsford and the Conclusion of Frank Norris’s The Octopus; Index.

Consistently embracing and interrogating the complexity that makes literature so compelling, Pizer’s critical work, like the fiction of Norris, occupies an indisputable place of prominence in our understanding of literary naturalism and American literature, and this volume reminds us why. —John Dudley, Studies in American Naturalism, Winter 2019, Vol. 14, No. 2