NATURALISM • DICTIONARY ONE.COM • Definition of Naturalism

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/nˈætʃərəlˌɪzəm/ /nˈætʃrəlˌɪzəm/ Listen

noun

Naturalism n.

A state of nature; conformity to nature.

(Metaph.) The doctrine of those who deny a supernatural agency in the miracles and revelations recorded in the Bible, and in spiritual influences; also, any system of philosophy which refers the phenomena of nature to a blind force or forces acting necessarily or according to fixed laws, excluding origination or direction by one intelligent will.

The theory that art or literature should conform to nature; realism; also, the quality, rendering, or expression of art or literature executed according to this theory.

Specifically: The principles and characteristics professed or represented by a 19th-century school of realistic writers, notably by Zola and Maupassant, who aimed to give a literal transcription of reality, and laid special stress on the analytic study of character, and on the scientific and experimental nature of their observation of life.

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Etymology of 'Naturalism'

Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48

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"Naturalism" Quotes from Famous Books

... earthly enjoyment. Such had been for ages the last lessons of all the 'mysteries' of the East—mysteries which it was the peculiar destiny of the Hebrew race to resist through ages of struggle. It was through the teaching of such mysteries of pantheistic naturalism that, as the unflinching Jewish deists and anthropomorphists believed, man fell, and their belief was set forth in their very first religious tradition—the history of the apple, the serpent, and the Fall. And it ...

— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various

... but there was nothing mean or vulgar in the works of the former; on the contrary, it was with a pure and noble spirit that he endeavored to represent the perfections of youthful, manly beauty, and his naturalism was of a ...

— A History of Art for Beginners and Students - Painting, Sculpture, Architecture • Clara Erskine Clement

... a fault, it was that he regarded all modern philosophy as sensuous naturalism; and if reason sometimes seemed to him suspicious, it was because he often confounded it with sophistry, which reasons indeed, but is far from ...

— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various

... third time I experienced the pain and joy of a sudden and inward light. Naturalism, truth, the new art, above all the phrase, "the new art," impressed me as with a sudden sense of light. I was dazzled, and I vaguely understood that my "Roses of Midnight" were sterile eccentricities, dead flowers that could not be galvanised into any semblance ...

— Confessions of a Young Man • George Moore

... where he says, "I am pleased to think that when a mere stripling I formed the opinion that true taste was virtue, and that bad writing was bad feeling."] Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats was unflinching in this particular. The Brownings subscribed to the doctrine. Tennyson's allegiance to scientific naturalism kept him in doubt for a time, but in the end his faith in beauty triumphed, and he was ready to praise the poet as inevitably possessing a nature exquisitely attuned to goodness. One often runs across dogmatic expression of the doctrine in minor ...

— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins

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