This book explores a remarkable parallelism in American literary and
legal histories: the parallel between naturalism and naturalization. At
the turn of the twentieth century, with the influx of unprecedented
waves of immigration, the judiciary is at a loss to define who is
"white" and who is not. In the courts of law, "whiteness" becomes a
performance of cultural assimilability rather than a biological fact. It
is this same cultural code of whiteness, this book argues, around which
the literature of naturalism revolves by engaging in naturalization
debate of its own.