I
Aesthetic movement of the late 19th to early 20th century.
The movement was inspired by the principles and methods of natural science, especially Darwinism , which were adapted to literature and art. In literature, naturalism extended the tradition of realism , aiming at an even more faithful, pseudoscientific representation of reality, presented without moral judgment. Characters in naturalistic literature typically illustrate the deterministic role of heredity and environment on human life. The movement originated in France, where its leading exponent was Stephen Crane and Theodore Dreiser . Visual artists associated with naturalism chose themes from life, capturing subjects unposed and not idealized, thus giving their works an unstudied air. Following the lead of the Realist painter Gustave Courbet , painters chose themes from contemporary life, and many deserted the studio for the open air, finding subjects among peasants and tradespeople, capturing them as they found them. As a result, finished canvases had the freshness and immediacy of sketches. Zola, the spokesman for literary naturalism, was also the first to champion Édouard Manet and the Impressionists (see Impressionism ).While naturalism was short-lived as a historical movement, it contributed to art an enrichment of realism, new areas of subject matter, and a largeness and formlessness that was closer to life than to art. Its multiplicity of impressions conveyed the sense of a world in constant flux.
II
In philosophy, the theory that affirms that all beings and events in the universe are natural and therefore can be fully known by the methods of scientific investigation.
Though naturalism has often been equated with materialism , it is much broader in scope. Strictly speaking, naturalism has no ontological bias toward any particular set of categories of reality: dualism and monism , atheism and theism , idealism and materialism are all compatible with it. Naturalism was most influential in the 1930s and '40s, chiefly in the U.S. among philosophers such as F.J.E. Woodbridge (1867–1940), Morris R. Cohen (1880–1947), {{link=Dewey, John">John Dewey , Ernest Nagel (1901–85), Sidney Hook (1902–89), and W.V.O. Quine .