Naturalism began as a branch of literary realism, and realism had favored fact, logic, and impersonality over the imaginative, symbolic, and supernatural.

Zola took this scientific method and argued that naturalism in literature should be like controlled experiments in which the characters function as the phenomena. The application of this method 'called for a scientist to conduct controlled experiments that would either prove or disprove hypotheses regarding those phenomena'. Comte had proposed a scientific method that 'went beyond empiricism, beyond the passive and detached observation of phenomena'.

Literary Naturalism traces back most directly to Émile Zola's 'The Experimental Novel' (1880), which details Zola's concept of a naturalistic novel, which traces philosophically to Auguste Comte's positivism, but also to physiologist Claude Bernard and historian Hippolyte Taine. The movement largely traces to the theories of French author Émile Zola. The novel would be an experiment where the author could discover and analyze the forces, or scientific laws, that influenced behavior, and these included emotion, heredity, and environment. Naturalism includes detachment, in which the author maintains an impersonal tone and disinterested point of view determinism, which is defined as the opposite of free will, in which a character's fate has been decided, even predetermined, by impersonal forces of nature beyond human control and a sense that the universe itself is indifferent to human life. Literary naturalism emphasizes observation and the scientific method in the fictional portrayal of reality.

Naturalism is a literary movement beginning in the late nineteenth century, similar to literary realism in its rejection of Romanticism, but distinct in its embrace of determinism, detachment, scientific objectivism, and social commentary. ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) ( July 2022) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) Please help to ensure that disputed statements are reliably sourced. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page. This article's factual accuracy is disputed.

Naturalist by Jim Ottaviani