The argument for the existence of a distinctive Naturalist school of writing depends on the joint publication, in 1880, of Les Soirées de Médan, a volume of short stories by Émile Zola, Guy de Maupassant, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Henry Céard, Léon Hennique, and Paul Alexis. The Naturalists purported to take a more scientifically analytic approach to the presentation of reality than had their predecessors, treating dissection as a prerequisite for description. Hence Zola’s attachment to the term naturalisme, borrowed from Hippolyte Taine, the positivist philosopher who claimed for literary criticism the status of a branch of psychology. It is difficult to ...(100 of 41004 words)