Power and Order: Henry Adams and the Naturalist Tradition in American Fiction

The naturalist tradition in American fiction was a product of the tremedous changes wrought in the late nineteenth-century America by the development of science and technology and by the intellectual upheavals associated with the ideas of Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud. This book is an account of naturalism, perhaps the strongetst and most influential intellectual tradition - or, as Harold Kaplan would argue, mythology - to affect modern American literature and culture. Kaplan approaches the naturalist writers through a study of Henry Adams. He sees in Adams the paradigmatic intelligence of his time - a prophetic mind, through not a seminal one - and a man absorbed with the twin notions of power and order. Adam's major work illustrates the joining of a literary imagination and moral temperment with an almost obsessive response to the science, economic life, and politics of his world. Adam's work exemplifies what Kaplan calls the myth of metapolitics - a view of human struggle and fate profoundly dominated by naturalist concepts of power. Kaplan then turns to the fascination that power in its various manifestations - material, moral, social, political - held for writers such as Dreiser, Norris, Crane, and others. Their dramatic plots, characters, and allegorical images are examined in detail, and Kaplan sees them pervaded by themes of redemptive apocalyptic modes of viewing history and the future - all legacies of the naturalist ethos. Historians of the ideas, politics, literature, and society of post- Civil War America will find in Kaplan's book an integrated discussion of the period's dominant ideology and of the works of it's important writers, Henry Adams in particular. In wider reference, this book should concern all those who are interested in the problems of modern ethics and politics in the effort to harmonize concepts of value with images of power and natural order. --- from book's dustjacket