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Frank Norris is a seminal figure in the history of American literary naturalism despite the brevity of his career. Frank Norris and American Naturalism brings together in one volume Donald Pizer’s lifelong exploration of the naturalist’s work, ranging from his 1955 discussion of point of view in The Octopus to his 2010 essay on the thematic unity of that novel. The essays in Frank Norris and American Naturalism as a whole seek to demonstrate both the coherence of Norris’s thought and his contribution toward the establishment of a specific form of naturalism in America. The collection’s principal focus is Norris’s most enduring works, the novels McTeague and The Octopus, though his other fiction and literary criticism are also discussed.
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
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.