Publisher's Synopsis
In this illuminating, comprehensive intellectual and literary history of the major American, British, and Continental novels of realism and naturalism from 1850 to 1950, Richard Lehan offers readers a new way of reading these works - moving outward from the text to forms of historical representation. He argues that literary naturalism is a narrative mode that creates its own reality separate from that of other narrative modes. Employing this strategy allows and encourages intertextuality - one novel talking or responding to another - for example, Zola's Nana to Dreiser's Sister Carrie or Zola's L'Assomoir to Sinclair's The Jungle.
