Frank Norris: A litery pioneer

During the late 1700s and early 1800s, romanticism was the dominant literary mode in Europe. With the likes of Washington Irving, Herman Melville and Edgar Allen Poe, romanticism stressed emotion, the imagination, and the subjectivity of approach. Until about 1870 romanticism influenced some major forms of American writing including transcendentalist writings, historical fiction, and sentimental fiction. By about the middle of the 19th century, new literary movements began to emerge. After the Civil War, writers like Mark Twain, Bret Harte, and Frank Norris began to experiment with movements called realism and naturalism. Unlike romanticism, realism attempted to describe human behavior and surroundings or to represent figures and objects exactly as they act or appear in life. Naturalism was an extreme form of realism. It added a dimension of predetermined fate that rendered human will ultimately powerless and often had an outlook that was bleaker than that of realism.
According to ...