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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.This was notable in his travel and environmental writings and in his 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. ... Read more

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Professor Charles Grant Blairfindie Allen (1848-1899) who also wrote under the pseudonyms Cecil Power; Olive Pratt Rayner; Martin Leach Warborough; J. Arbuthnot Wilson was a science writer, author and novelist; an able upholder of the theory of evolution. Born near Kingston, Ontario, Canada, the son of an emigrant Anglo-Scottish Protestant minister and grandson of the fifth Baron of Longueuil, he studied at King Edward's School in Birmingham, Merton College in Oxford, both in the United Kingdom. He also studied in France and in his mid-twenties became a professor at Queen's College in Jamaica. His first books were on scientific subjects, and include Physiological Æsthetics (1877) and Flowers and Their Pedigrees (1886). In Allen's many articles on flowers and perception in insects, Darwinian arguments replaced the old Spencerian terms. After assisting Sir W. W. Hunter in his Gazeteer of India in the early 1880s, Allen turned his attention to fiction, and between 1884 and 1899 produced about 30 novels. He was also a pioneer in Canadian science fiction, with the 1895 novel The British Barbarians. His short story The Thames Valley Catastrophe (published 1901 in The Strand Magazine) describes the destruction of London by a sudden and massive volcanic eruption. ... Read more