In Naturalist Fiction, the first major study of naturalist fiction as a distinct literary genre, Professor Baguley focuses mainly on French naturalist literature, analysing a number of key works in detail, as well as drawing on examples from other national traditions, particularly from the English novel.

Mexico in Its Novel is a perceptive examination of the Mexican reality as revealed through the nation's novel. The author presents the Mexican novel as a cultural phenomenon: a manifestation of the impact of history upon the nation, an attempt by a people to come to grips with and understand what has happened and is happening to them. Written in a clear and graceful style, this study examines the life of the novel as a genre against the background of Mexican chronology. It begins with a survey of the mid-twentieth-century novel, the Mexican novel which came of age in the period following the 1947 publication of Agustín Yáñez's The Edge of the Storm. During this time the novel resolved some of its most complicated problems and, as a result, offered a wider and deeper view of reality. Having established this circumstance, John Brushwood goes back in time to the Conquest and then moves forward to the twentieth-century novel. Passing from the Colonial Period into the nineteenth century, the author recognizes the relationship between Romanticism and the desire for logical social behavior, and then views this relationship in the perspective of the Reform, an attempt to bring order out of chaos. The novel under the Díaz dictatorship is seen in three different phases, and the last Díaz chapter actually moves into the Revolution itself. The novel during the years of fighting is considered along with the first post-Revolutionary fiction. From that point the developing conflict within Mexican reality itself—a conflict between introversion and extroversion, nationalism and cosmopolitanism—reaches out to seek its solution in the novels of the first chapter.

The book collects Pizer’s late career essays on various writers and subjects related to American naturalism. Of these, two seek to describe the movement as a whole, six are on specific writers or works (with an emphasis on Theodore Dreiser), and two reprint informative interviews by Pizer on the subject. The essays reflect Pizer’s mature engagement of the subject he has spent a lifetime exploring.

In this book, Rojas explores comparatively the representations of deviant and criminal women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from Transatlantic perspectives in literary productions of the first-wave feminist writers of the New Woman movement and writers of Radical Naturalism. This work addresses how the writers' sex is relevant in depictions of social constructions of female characters and how they established a dialogue based on gender through the themes of 'femme fatale', marginal spaces, eugenics, and social Darwinism in the novels of Emilia Pardo Bazán's 'La piedra angular' (1891), 'La gota de sangre' (1911), and "Tio Terrones" (1920); Refugio Barragán de Toscano's 'La hija del bandido o los subterráneos del nevado' (1887); Federico Gamboa's 'Santa' (1903); Kate Chopin's (Katherine O'Flaherty) 'The Awakening' (1899); Thomas Hardy's 'Tess of the D'Urbervilles' (1891); and 'Grand's Ideala' (1888). There is a good volume of research on different aspects of these novels, but this book addresses issues of the social constructions of deviant and criminal women from an interdisciplinary and metatheoretical perspective often missed from established criticism. This work is not only reachable for the non-expertise reader, graduate, or undergraduate students but also it is sufficiently elaborated for the expert reader in different fields. It provides a detailed analysis of the social, historical, philosophical, and scientific background that shows how the treatment of the female characters converges and diverges from male and female writers of the New Woman and Radical Naturalism points of view. It can be a good contribution for references or classes in Hispanic studies, gender studies, women's studies, sexuality studies, nineteenth-century studies, and in other fields.

This enduring classic of Mexican literature traces the path to ruination of a country girl, Santa, who moves to Mexico City after she is impregnated and abandoned by her lover and subsequently shunned by her family. Once in the city, Santa turns to prostitution and soon gains prominence as Mexico City's most sought-after courtesan. Despite the opportunities afforded by her success, including the chance to quit prostitution, Santa is propelled by her personal demons toward her ultimate downfall. This evocative novel--justly famous for its vividly detailed depiction of the cityscape and the city's customs, social interactions, and political activities--assumed singular importance in Mexican popular culture after its original publication in 1903. The book inspired Mexico's first "talkie" and several other film adaptations, a music score, a radio series, a television soap opera, and a pornographic comic book. Naturalist writer Federico Gamboa, who was also a lawyer and politician, reveals much about Mexican mores and culture at the start of the twentieth century and beyond, from expectations regarding gender roles to the myth of the corrupting and decadent city. In describing how Santa is at the mercy of social problems beyond her control, Gamboa provides a rich historical portrayal of widespread conditions in the years leading to the Mexican Revolution.