Abstract

The paper analyzes James Baldwin's short fiction in relation to the literary movement of naturalism. Its aim is to identify the elements of naturalistic poetics in Baldwin's short stories illustrating them with appropriate examples, as well as to determine the extent to which they influence and color the tone of Baldwin's fiction. Since naturalism has many different aspects, mainly depending on the period and the region of its development , the essay discusses only the viewpoints which can be applied to the literature in question, using the observations by theorists and critics such as Louis J. Budd, Donald Pizer and Charles Child Walcutt. In addition, though it might, initially, seem rather disadvantageous to subject the writer's complex mode of expression to such inherited simplification, the paper will prove the opposite, that not only can Baldwin's literature be viewed in such constricted literary terms, but it can also contribute to the contemporary effort to further understand and appreciate this literary phase of American fiction which, although it emerged at the turn of the twentieth century, still plays a significant role in American literary history