was to undertake a scientific study by recording facts, living conditions, and behavior:
Naturalism was thus realism scientized, systematized, taken finally beyond realist principles of fidelity to common experience or of humanistic exploring of individual lives within the social and moral web to an experiment in the laws of social and biological existence (Bradbury 9).
Naturalism is evident in the late nineteenth century in authors such as Stephen Crane, and the psychological realism of later nineteenth-century American fiction like Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage or Maggie: A Girl of the Streets shows in that these American novels are naturalistic in a way that makes the psychology of characters stark against the realistically drawn background. The shift from realism to naturalism is not a jarring one, for naturalism is only an extended and more scientific approach to realism, one that delves more deeply into the commonplace and that addresses elements in society (such as the bowery people in Maggie) that earlier would have been ignored.
The soldier who is the hero of The Red Badge of Courage, Henry, has certain illusions about the meaning of war and about his own ability to face war. Because of the power of these illusions, t
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