Like most nineteenth-century French realists, Maupassant's interest in positivistic models of the human being, from Darwinian evolution to the new psychologies, led him to scientific readings, detailed documentations of "milieu," and contemporary subjects which he then treated with literary techniques drawn from both the realist Flaubert and the naturalist Zola. It is in extending these techniques to the fantastic, however, that Maupassant achieves an original and highly effective amalgam best characterized as "Le Naturalisme fantastique."
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