The Oxford Handbook of American Literary Naturalism offers twenty-eight original essays about an important genre that typically depicts human beings as the product of biological and environmental forces. Drawing upon recent scholarship as well as innovations in cultural studies, contributors offer an authoritative and in-depth reassessment of a genre that included writers from Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London to Kate Chopin, Edith Wharton, Upton Sinclair, Ernest Hemingway, John Steinbeck, Richard Wright, Joyce Carol Oates, Cormac McCarthy, and Don DeLillo.

Keith Newlin is Professor and Chair of the Department of English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Most recently, he is the author of Hamlin Garland, A Life and editor of A Summer to Be, a Memoir by the Daughter of Hamlin Garland.

Introduction
Keith Newlin
Part 1: Contexts
1. Romancing the Machine: American Naturalism in Transatlantic Context
Zena Meadowsong
2. The Response to Power in American Literary Naturalism: Visions and Revisions that Transformed a Narrative Mode
Richard Lehan
3. Nature in Naturalism
Bert Bender
Part 2: Naturalism and Genre
4. Defining American Literary Naturalism
Eric Carl Link
5. Sand in Your Mouth: Naturalism and Other Genres
June Howard
6. The Documentary Strategies of Naturalism
Keith Newlin
Part 3: The Scientific and Philosophic Background
7. Determinism, Free will, and Moral Responsibility in American Literary Naturalism
Ian F. Roberts
8. 'First Principles of Morals': Evolutionary Morality and American Naturalism
Rick Armstrong
9. Naturalism and Religion
Steven Frye
10. Things Fall Apart: Degeneration and Atavism in American Literary Naturalism
Gina M. Rossetti
11. American Literary Naturalism and Psychology
Stephen C. Brennan
12. American Naturalism and Modern Evolutionary Psychology
Jeff P. Turpin
Part 4: Naturalist Tensions
13. Women Writers and Naturalism
Donna M. Campbell
14. American Literary Naturalism and Sexuality
Linda Kornasky
15. African American Writers and Naturalism
John Dudley
16. Naturalism and Racialism
Jeanne Campbell Reesman
17. Naturalism and Commodity Culture
Mary E. Papke
18. Naturalism and Class
Jude Davies
19. The Grotesque City, the City of Excess, and the City of Exile
James Giles
20. Naturalism and Crime
Gary Scharnhorst
Part 5: Naturalism and the Marketplace
21. Naturalist Authors and the American Literary Marketplace
Charles Johanningsmeier
22. Consolation, Affirmation, and Convention: The Popular Reception of American Naturalist Texts
Carol S. Loranger
23. Editing Naturalism
Kevin J. Hayes
24. Refashioning American Literary Naturalism: Critical Trends at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century
Christophe Den Tandt
Part 6: Naturalism and the Other Arts
25. Sad Endings and Negative Heroes: The Naturalist Tradition in American Drama
Robert M. Dowling
26. Naturalism and Poetry
Christopher Beyers
27. Naturalism and the Visual Arts
Donald Pizer
28. American Literary Naturalism and Film Noir
Jeff Jaeckle