Many readers and critics have dismissed literary naturalism as “pessimistic determinism” – an approach that denies the potential for individual freedom and that see human beings as helpless to control their own destiny. At the same time, others read works such as the stories we have read by Crane and London as affirming the values of humanism that arise out of the rational philosophies of the Nineteenth Century. What is your response to these stories of successful and unsuccessful survival? What, if anything, is “instructive” (to use Crane’s term) or compelling about these stories?
