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

By Nineteenth-Century Prose

Release Date: 1996-09-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines

Description

Abstract Theodore Dreiser's brief but significant 1903 essay "True Art Speaks Plainly" draws upon the central issues present in over twenty years of debate in America on the social and ethical nature of realism and naturalism. In particular, 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. The article explores both the full dimensions of the debate during the 1880s and 1890s by a wide variety of American critics and Dreiser's pithy recapitulation of its essential character.

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