ABSTRACT
One phenomenon of the late nineteenth century in America unites the diverse interpretations of a multitude of cultural commentators. All agree that the 1880s and 1890s were marked by deep and irreconcilable divisions between those who accepted Darwin’s theory of evolution and its social, political, and moral consequences, and those who propounded alternative possibilities to capitalism, unbridled compe tition, and the survival of the fittest. With the benefit of a century’s hindsight, it is tempting to dismiss all those who reacted against the given realities of the situation as ‘escapists’，and it is one of the great virtues of recent cultural history that a number of scholars have illumi nated the centrality and urgency of the debates which coloured every aspect of intellectual life in those decades. Whether the emphasis is primarily political, as in Peter Cann，s The Divided Mind; economic, as in Alan Trachtenburg’s The Incorporation of America; aesthetic，as in Jackson Lear’s No Place of Grace; or sociological, as in Marcus Klein*s Foreigners, the picture that emerges is one of crucial struggles between modernists and anti-modernists, or between socialists and capitalists, struggles which took as their ground the village or the city, the past or the future, and the individual or the collective. Inevitably, these issues found their way into the fiction of the time, and though the great debate is often confused by writers shifting their ground or holding contradictory positions within single novels, the way in which novel ists responded imaginatively to the situation is a clear indication of the extent to which the theme had pervaded the national consciousness.
