Naturalist Fiction: The Entropic Vision (Cambridge Studies in French, Series Number 28)

This is the first major study of naturalist fiction as a distinct literary genre. It focuses mainly on French naturalist literature, analysing a number of key works in detail, but also draws examples from other national traditions, particularly from the English novel. Professor Baguley questions and revises many traditional assumptions on important theoretical issues such as the nature of literary history, the concepts of 'realism' and 'naturalism', and the relations between science and literature. He demonstrates the prevalence of certain recurrent generic patterns, themes and techniques in the general body of naturalist literature, ranging from disquieting tragic developments to the most outrageous ironic and parodic effects. He argues persuasively that, far from being a mere record of the external aspects of reality, naturalist fiction is a literature of 'scandalous' provocation which employs the strategies of realist art to convey a profoundly disturbing vision of that reality.

This is the first major study of naturalist fiction as a distinct literary genre. The author focuses mainly on French naturalist literature, but also draws examples from other national traditions, particularly from the English novel. Professor Baguley questions many traditional assumptions on important theoretical issues such as the nature of literary history, the concepts of "realism" and "naturalism," and the relations between science and literature. He also analyzes a number of key works in detail. He demonstrates that, far from merely recording the external aspects of reality, naturalist fiction employs the strategies of realist art to convey a profoundly disturbing vision of that reality.

Just as narratologists have recently made much of the fundamental distinction between the events that are supposed to have occurred in a story and the narrative that relates them (histoire and recit in Genette's terminology), historiographers have long since distinguished between, on the one hand, history as the happenings of the past and, on the other hand, accounts that have been or could be produced to relate those happenings.