To Build a Fire
by Jack London

To Build a Fire: Genre 1 key example

Genre
Explanation and Analysis:

"To Build a Fire" is a classic example of literary Naturalism, a movement originally proposed in the late 1800s by French novelist Émile Zola and introduced to America by Frank Norris. Naturalism was a subcategory of literary Realism, which emerged in the mid 1800s as a response to Romanticism and Transcendentalism. Romantic and Transcendentalist literature valued emotion and intuition, emphasized the importance of self-reliance, and rejected many aspects of modernity. Transcendentalists in particular believed that humans had a spiritual connection to nature and were deeply distrustful of industrialization.