This study attempts to re-contextualize the works and career of James Lane Allen (1849-1925), a now neglected Southern writer from Lexington, Kentucky, whose career, from the late 1880s until his death in 1925, overlapped a transitional period in American literature. Today, Allen is universally equated with the Southern genteel writer Thomas Nelson Page, known in particular for sentimentally idealizing the Old South's plantation way of life in his fiction, which, in turn, appealed to the mainstream Victorian audience. This study will focus on the "other" James Lane Allen, the anti-Victorian writer who wrote against the political grain of his time, and whose unconventional novels do not invite comparison with works by Page or other genteel writers, since these novels by Allen exude an exotic mixture of pagan sensuality and Darwinian principles foreign to "moonlight and magnolias" fare being served at the time. / Specifically, this study focuses on a particular historical moment in Allen's career and in literary history: the textual history of Allen's first unconventional novel, Summer in Arcady (1896), one of the first "serious" American novels to positively picture sexual desire in Darwinian terms, and particularly bold for its depiction of a female character who exhibits sexual urges. Along with a number of before-now unprinted letters by Allen, the data concerning this work's original and revised states challenges popular twentieth century interpretations of the novel, which--oddly enough--often dismiss the work as a heavy-handed moral treatise on the necessity of chastity before marriage. Far from being the sentimental moralist in this work, Allen is shown to have been strongly influenced by principles of evolution, especially as they related to sexual desire and sexual function, and to have envisioned a work which positively pictured sexual desire as natural. Thus, this "other" Allen, not known as a literary Naturalist, is shown on a number of occasions to have participated in that artistic mindset, and consequently to have produced radically unconventional works within the context of the Victorian cultural milieu. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 57-02, Section: A, page: 0681. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1995.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:fsu.edu/oai:fsu.digital.flvc.org:fsu_77657 |
| Contributors | Johnson, Amy Karen., Florida State University |
| Source Sets | Florida State University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Text |
| Format | 175 p. |
| Rights | On campus use only. |
| Relation | Dissertation Abstracts International |
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