UC Irvine

While the discourses of the physical and social sciences gave literary naturalists a useful framework for understanding the world (how environments determined human action), those same discourses ended up calling into question the freedom—and thus the value—of artists who were themselves understood to be determined by natural and social forces. How, over time, literary naturalists frame and navigate both this issue and the larger issue of the relationship between the aesthetic and determinism furnishes the subject matter for this dissertation.