The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism is a non-fiction book written by literary theorist and author Walter Benn Michaels and first published in 1988 by the University of California Press.

The author examines topics such as the alienation of property, the proclivity for masochism, and the battle over free silver, analyzing the cultural forms these phenomena affect and shape.

"[2] Professor Jon Dietrick writes that, in The Gold Standard, the author locates in American literary naturalism an anxiety over issues of material reality and representation.

In The Gold Standard specifically, he claims that Michaels outlines two gendered models of Gilded Age writing: a kind of "feminine consumption and masculine production."

The naturalists, Wells claims, may have conceived of their project as one of opposition to "consumer culture," but, by championing masculine production over feminine consumption, their turn-of-the-century naturalism ended up "endorsing, rather than undermining, the dominant economic logic of the age.

"[5] Literary critic, philosopher, and political theorist Fredric Jameson relates[6]: 182  how Michaels, in the book, has given himself over so completely to the logic of its content and the "inner dynamic of [its] objects" that the great problems of that age and ours appear not summoned but under their own momentum.