Speculative Naturalism and the Problem of Scale: Richard Jefferies’s After London, After Darwin

Although naturalism shares some features with realism and others with modernism, it has properties that contrast with the realist and modernist prioritization of felt individual experience as the evidentiary matrix on which their accounts of the world are based. Naturalist fiction is committed to mi...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Modern language quarterly (Seattle) 2015-03, Vol.76 (1), p.31-56
Main Author: Plotz, John
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Authors
Criticism and interpretation
Fiction
Influence
Jefferies, Richard (1848-1887)
Literary Criticism
Literary Theory
Literature and Literary Studies
Modernism
Morphology
Naturalists
Novels
Subjectivity
Twain, Mark (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) (1835-1910)
Writers
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Description
Summary:Although naturalism shares some features with realism and others with modernism, it has properties that contrast with the realist and modernist prioritization of felt individual experience as the evidentiary matrix on which their accounts of the world are based. Naturalist fiction is committed to microscopic description, below the level of experiential subjectivity, and to macroscopic abstraction. Some of the odder fictional experiments of the era are best understood with reference to the morphology of naturalism, including what might be called the speculative naturalism of Richard Jefferies, Mark Twain, and others. Jefferies’s 1885 , an early and critically neglected work of British speculative fiction, is a bellwether of the widely distributed naturalist impulses among novelists responding to the era of scientific naturalism marked by the appearance of Charles Darwin’s (1859) and (1871).
ISSN:0026-7929
1527-1943
DOI:10.1215/00267929-2827538