Lehan's book provides readers with an illuminating and readable comprehensive intellectual and literary history of the major American, British, and Continental novels of
Realism and Naturalism from 1850 to 1950. He offers readers a new way of reading these novels-working outward from the text to forms of historical representation. In this way, literary
naturalism can be seen as a narrative mode that creates its own reality separate from that of other narrative modes. Employing this strategy, Lehan contends, readers will find a spectrum
of meaning in these works that allows and encourages intertextuality-one novel talking or responding to another-for example, Zola's Nana to Dreiser's Sister Carrie or Zola's
L'Assomoir to Sinclair's The Jungle.
The range of novelists and sub genres is staggering-Lehan studies the gothic novel, the urban novel, the detective novel, the novel of imperial adventure, the western
novel, the noir novel, and the novels of utopia and distopia.
