‘True Art Speaks Plainly’: Theodore Dreiser and the Late Nineteenth-Century American Debate over Realism and Naturalism

Abstract

Through an analysis of Theodore Dreiser’s 1903 essay, explores Dreiser’s pithy recapitulation of the essential character of the debate during the 1880s and 1890s over the social and ethical nature of realism and naturalism. Claims Dreiser responds to the distaste and the fear of change underlying a distrust of realism and naturalism and to the conventional religiosity underlying a refusal to countenance the depiction of man’s sexual nature.