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This chapter examines George A. Romero's traditions as a filmmaker. Romero was hailed as the director of Night of the Living Dead (1968), a film popularly associated with initiating the gore and special effects syndrome affecting contemporary horror films such as Scream (1997) and I Know What You Did Last Summer (1998). However, the name of George A. Romero really owes much to that relatively brief moment of independent commercial cinema of the 1960s and 1970s. The era saw the emergence of a renaissance in the American horror film characterized by significant works by directors Larry Cohen, Wes Craven, Brian De Palma and Tobe Hooper, which promised revitalization of the Hollywood film industry. This chapter considers literary naturalism and its association with Emile Zola's literary and theoretical explorations, along with the portrayal of zombies in cinema and how the methods used by human survivors in Romero's films differ from those within naturalistic novels. It also discusses Romero's comic book style, especially that relating to 1950s EC Comics.

This chapter focuses on Frank Norris's novel Vandover and the Brute and its ability to communicate a failed critical insight that is the subject of the artist's uncompleted masterpiece: a salon picture of a British cavalryman lost in the Sudan, which renders legible the deep connections between aesthetics and global vision. It attempts to complete Vandover's half-finished artwork by rounding out the ideological impulses that led the artist to the Imperial for drink and diversion in the first place. The chapter discusses the convergence of capital and aesthetics by contending that Norris's writing reveals a logic linking literary naturalism with early globalization along the Pacific Rim, focusing on the United States' incursions into “the East.” It looks at how conceptualization of the globe as a single geo-economic unit depends on a historically specific aesthetic formalism exemplified by Norris's fiction. The contradictory nature of this project—that is, a contextual history of aesthetic formalism—captures the logic that ushers an Americanized global sensibility into being.

This chapter considers the film Dawn of the Dead (1978) and its intrinsic relationship to literary naturalism. Widely regarded as a “gross-out” horror film relying on the EC Comic tradition, Dawn of the Dead unconsciously refers to naturalist elements associated with Emile Zola and other writers who have key associations with the horror genre. The film not only saw Romero's return to the zombie motifs of his first feature film but also resulted in a synthesis of many ideas present in There's Always Vanilla, Jack's Wife, The Crazies, and Martin. The primary colors and camera angles represent a more assured and deliberate utilization of the visual world of EC Comics both in style and content. Dawn of the Dead links together the special effects endemic to the horror genre as well as significant social meanings Romero always brings into his work. Dawn of the Dead concludes by bringing its two surviving protagonists to the point where the work of creating the norms for a new social order, a new structure of relationships, can begin.

This chapter reviews Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968). Night of the Living Dead has long been associated with the derogative term “splatter movie.” But it is much more than just a horror film. It is not only a key work of independent low-budget cinema; it also combines several important cultural traditions such as the grotesque aspect of literary naturalism and the thematic traditions of 1950s EC Comics in terms of a devastating critique upon the deformations of human personality operating within a ruthless capitalist society. Night of the Living Dead thematically interrogates the dysfunctional mechanisms of a deeply disturbed society. It explicitly presents the image of an America in which the old values were now harmful and obsolete, leading to a chaos very few would survive unless some drastic personal, political and social change would follow.

This chapter compares Vladimir Nabokov with Brazilian novelist Joaquím Maria Machado de Assis and examines how the similarities and differences between them throw light on the resources of fiction and the range of literary vision. The two authors could almost have thought up some of each other's works. Nabokov played again and again with the central paradox of Machado's novel, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. Machado and Nabokov seem particularly close in their quick comic asides to readers. Both wring comedy, drama, and psychological revelation from the narrator's processes of composition and publication; often explore the self-love entangled with the love of another; are obsessed about time as loss; and resist the determinism of literary naturalism.

This chapter examines the history of the American short story. It examines Washington Irving's The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon (1819–20), which contain the earliest short stories in American literature, “Rip Van Winkle” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.”. It then discusses Poe and the first-person narrative; humorists of the Old Southwest; Mark Twain's extensive use of dialect in his works; American literary naturalism; Ernest Hemingway's lean writing style; and postmodernist fiction.

The classic Hollywood Western is generally taken to be the antithesis of avant-garde art, a popular genre unaffected by modernism. However, John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) provides an illustrative example of middlebrow American modernist cinema. Influenced by French literary naturalism and German expressionism, Ford’s Western obliquely engages with the ills of modern urban existence and the interrelated “crises of modernity” that characterized the interwar years, when the global viability of liberal democracy was cast into doubt. In Stagecoach, the problems of modernity are treated (diegetically), though not fully cured, by a transformative if dangerous journey into the American Wild West. By integrating the formal innovations of F. W. Murnau’s expressionist style with his own epic and monumental vision of the American west, Ford epitomized an underappreciated form of American vernacular modernism that emerged across the arts in the 1910s, flourished in the 1920s and 1930s, and survived into the post-WWII era.

This chapter analyzes the historicizing function of muscle building in literary naturalism and the physical-culture movement of the late nineteenth century. It begins by considering Sojourner Truth's famous baring of her muscular arm as a sign of her exemplary character and goes on to ask what kind of political promise was lodged in the transformations of muscle building. It pursues this question first through an account of the emergence of muscle as an emblem of national fitness in a variety of educational, phrenological, sociological, and political writings of the period and of its deeper roots in the rhetoric of character. It then turns to the spectacular display of muscular bodies and the rise of bodybuilding contests in the National Police Gazette and in the broader physical-culture media, focusing in particular on the ways that the muscular body destabilized the visual economy of gender and sexuality. Finally, it examine the writings of Charlotte Perkins Gilman, who was a physical-culture advocate and avid body builder, and the problematic role that muscle building plays in her utopian feminist politics and racial nationalism. The overarching aim in contrasting the visual economy of the Gazette with the narratives of Gilman is to look beyond the classificatory and disciplinary functions through which modernity's visual culture of surveillance is frequently interpreted. It does this by reading the practices of muscle building not as a commodification of the body but rather as a rehistoricization of the body, a rehistoricization that transforms the body into the visible and kinesthetic record of its own reflexive exercise.

This chapter offers a reading of Larry Brown’s 2000 novel Fay, arguing that its pervasive violence is a defining characteristic of the postmodern South. A gripping and violent tale of a young woman who escapes an abusive home life and travels alone through Mississippi, Fay associates the road with violence, danger, and gruesome death. In handling this dark environment and its effect on his characters, Brown summons the Southern Gothicism of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor as well as the school of literary naturalism. Moreover, he creates empathy for his characters that is in stark contrast to stereotypical depictions of the Southern poor whites.