Nova obzorja u američkom naturalizmu: roman Maggie Stephena Cranea
New horizons in American naturalism: Stephen Crane’s Maggie

Summary/Abstract: The paper discusses Stephen Crane’s novel Maggie, first published in 1893, within the context of the American literary tradition in the 1880s and 1890s. Particular light is shed on the challenges of categorization and definition of ‘naturalism’ in American literature, highlighting major influences that contributed to the American naturalistic literary tendencies. Among those are diverse and complex socio-economic, cultural and intellectual shifts of the time, as well as the realistic-veritistic tenets of William Dean Howells and Émile Zola’s naturalistic approach. Stephen Crane’s departures from the standard features of naturalistic literary practice are also examined, including his specific tangential relationship to the presentation of the characters’ fate exclusively against the background of hereditary forces and environment. To this end, the essay also explores Crane’s use of tension in language, irony, parody, and impressionistic coloring as literary devices and innovative features that portended his idiosyncratic stylistic effects, thereby contributing to new horizons in American naturalism. Simultaneously, these traits of Crane’s writing reveal textual strategies that diverge from prescribed realistic and naturalistic narrative expressions and ideological assumptions, thereby laying groundwork for the later development of early modernist literary ideas and techniques.

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