Grant Allen: Literature and Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siècle

ISBN-13: 9780754608653 / Angielski / Twarda / 2005 / 264 str.

William Greenslade;Terence Rodgers

Opis

A strikingly interdisciplinary figure in Victorian literary history, Grant Allen (1848 - 99) has thus far managed to elude the focused scrutiny of contemporary scholarship. This collection offers a valuable analytical and bibliographical resource for the exploration of the man and his work. Grant Allen was a prolific novelist, essayist, and man of letters, who is best remembered today for his Woman Who Did (1895), which gained fame and notoriety almost overnight through its exploration of female independence and sexuality outside marriage, precipitating rabid denunciations of the 'new woman'. Allen engaged with a span of literary and cultural concerns in the late-Victorian period that extended beyond gender politics, however; equally important was his sustained intervention in debates about Darwinism, Spencerism, and evolution, on which subjects he was recognized as an authority and as the foremost popularizer alongside T. H. Huxley and Benjamin Kidd. Not only did Allen's work link the literary and the scientific, it traversed the boundaries between elite and popular culture, demonstrating their interconnectedness. experiments in orientalist and detective fiction, fantasy, and science fiction. The contributors to this collection approach the figure of Allen from diverse fields within Victorian studies, showing him to be a late-Victorian innovator but also an example of fin-de-siecle modernity. Grant Allen: Literature and Cultural Politics at the Fin de Siecle revisits the richly variegated profile of one of the most intriguing and significant polymaths of the turn of the century, recognizing his contribution to and influence on the key modernizing debates of the period.

Recenzje

’Collectively, the essays provide a good intellectual portrait of Allen... a fine job opening up Allen's work for critical discussion.’ Victorian Studies

Spis treści

Contents: Resituating Grant Allen: writing, radicalism and modernity, William Greenslade and Terence Rodgers; Grant Allen: a biographical essay, Peter Morton; Grant Allen: 'writing to the moment', John Lucas; Grant Allen, Spencer and Darwin, Heather Atchison; 'The romance of race': Grant Allen's science as cultural capital, Lyssa Randolph; The Woman Who Did and 'The girl who didn't': the romance of sexual selection in Grant Allen and Ménie Muriel Dowie, Sabine Ernst; Grant Allen and the new politics, Chris Nottingham; 'Intentional rudeness'?: The British Barbarians and the cultural politics of 1895, Nick Freeman; Grant Allen's impersonal secretaries: rereading The Type-Writer Girl, Leah Price; The detective's Doppelgänger: conflicting states of female consciousness in Grant Allen's detective fiction, Chris Willis; Grant Allen and the business of travel, Jill Steward; The old man and his ghost: Grant Allen, H.G. Wells, and popular anthropology, Patrick Parrinder; Grant Allen's publications: a checklist, Peter Morton; Bibliography; Index.

O autorze

William Greenslade is the Principal Lecturer in English at the University of the West of England, UK. Terence Rodgers is the Head of the Department of Media Communications and Cultural Studies at Bath Spa University College, UK.