Figures of the World: The Naturalist Novel and Transnational Form overturns Eurocentric genealogies and globalizing generalizations about “world literature” by examining the complex, contradictory history of naturalist fiction. Christopher Laing Hill traces the history of naturalist fiction from its emergence in France in the 1860s through its spread around the world from North and South America to East Asia in the twentieth century. Hill explores the development of three naturalist figures “figures”—the degenerate body, the self-liberated woman, and the social milieu—through close readings of fiction from France, Japan, and the United States. Novels by Émile Zola, Tayama Katai, Frank Norris, and other writers reveal conspicuous departures from metropolitan models as writers revised naturalist methods to confront new social conditions.