The Travels of Naturalism and the Challenges of a World Literary History

The history of the naturalist novel reveals shortcomings of recent proposals for the study of world literature, such as those of Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova. After a naturalist esthetic coalesced in France in the 1860s naturalist schools appeared around the world. Contrary to what models of diffusion predict, naturalism flourished in distant parts of the world at the same time as its triumph in Europe, while writers nearer France rejected it. The examples of naturalism in Argentina, Brazil, Japan, China, and Korea, reveal multiple, overlapping histories that make up the heterogeneous planetary history of the form. Naturalism’s movement was aided by its association with non-fictional genres such as criminology, and flourished where other forms of realistic fiction were not well established. Even when naturalism bore the standard for realism, however, it formed unexpected alliances with other esthetics and shifted its associations with non-fictional genres. Rather than focusing on the origination and reception of forms such as the naturalist novel, studies of world literature should focus on the conditions of travel through which such unexpected transformations occur. When we think about the global circulation of literary forms, it typically is in terms of departures and arrivals. A particular manner of writing appears in one place, achieves some renown, and is ‘received’ someplace else. Thinking about departures and arrivals encourages imagining the planet through an international logic, as if it were composed of points where forms take off and land. What happens in between is usually called ‘diffusion’, an outward radiation from the point of origin. In their own ways the most important models we have for literary history on a planetary scale, those of Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova, reason in such terms. More than any of the other recent efforts to imagine how we might write the literary history of the world, the work of Moretti and Casanova boldly addresses the impact of global systems on local literary practice. Yet each sketches a world of national (or at most regional) literatures interacting globally. Moretti, in explaining the diffusion of the European novel, emphasizes its interaction with ‘local’ narrative forms upon arrival, while Casanova sketches an international literary field, centered on France, in which writers in peripheral nations adopt European forms to gain prestige. While the international logic of Moretti and Casanova may reflect their frequent stress on Europe as a point of departure, it bears observing that the typical response, to focus on ‘appropriation’ at the point of arrival, as peripheral writers turn European forms to their own purposes, relies on the same logic of departures and arrivals. At a time when transnational movements of capital and people have exposed the historicity of national culture, we should ask whether an international logic can grasp the history of literary forms on a planetary scale. The history of naturalist fiction, a variety of European realism that moved quickly around the world in the late 19th century and the early 20th, is an exemplary case for examining the shortcomings of current models of world literary history. In European