NATURALISM • DICCIONARIO INGLES.COM • Definition of Naturalism

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/nˈætʃərəlˌɪzəm/ /nˈætʃrəlˌɪzəm/ Listen

noun

Naturalism n.

A state of nature; conformity to nature.

(Metaph.) The doctrine of those who deny a supernatural agency in the miracles and revelations recorded in the Bible, and in spiritual influences; also, any system of philosophy which refers the phenomena of nature to a blind force or forces acting necessarily or according to fixed laws, excluding origination or direction by one intelligent will.

The theory that art or literature should conform to nature; realism; also, the quality, rendering, or expression of art or literature executed according to this theory.

Specifically: The principles and characteristics professed or represented by a 19th-century school of realistic writers, notably by Zola and Maupassant, who aimed to give a literal transcription of reality, and laid special stress on the analytic study of character, and on the scientific and experimental nature of their observation of life.

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Etymology of 'Naturalism'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Naturalism" Quotes from Famous Books

... tragical. The entire romantic school was born from him, Victor Hugo and George Sand, Theophile Gautier who draws from the French tongue resources unequalled in wealth and colour, and even M. Zola himself, whose naturalism, after all, is but the last form and, as it were, the end of romanticism, since it would be difficult to discover in him any characteristic that did not exist, as a germ at ...

— An Iceland Fisherman • Pierre Loti

... composed on the principle that everything is permissible except the tame and the conventional. The productions of these young innovators differed widely from one another, but they had a common note in their vehement would-be naturalism. There were over-wrought pictures of daring sin and terrible punishment; novels and plays laying bare the misere of the social conflict; tragedies of insurgent passion at war with conventional ideas; of true love crossed ...

— The Life and Works of Friedrich Schiller • Calvin Thomas

... will get in some day, you may be sure," he answered. "There is no spirit higher and stronger than the spirit of naturalism in man; and in time, when a few prejudices have died away and mawkish sentiment has been worn threadbare, Zola will be enrolled as the first of the French Academicians, with even more honors than if he had succeeded in the beginning. That is ...

— Ziska - The Problem of a Wicked Soul • Marie Corelli

... delicate in childhood, and the stage of hardy naturalism which interposes itself between tender juvenility and the birth of self-consciousness did not in his case last long enough to establish his frame in the vigour to which it was tending. There was nothing sickly about ...

— A Life's Morning • George Gissing

... not enough barely to tolerate as a poetical license that which is, in truth, the essence of all poetry. The introduction of the chorus would be the last and decisive step; and if it only served this end, namely, to declare open and honorable warfare against naturalism in art, it would be for us a living wall which tragedy had drawn around herself, to guard her from contact with the world of reality, and maintain her own ideal soil, her ...

— The Works of Frederich Schiller in English • Frederich Schiller

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