420349642

Decadent culture in the United States : art and literature against the American grain, 1890-1926 / David Weir

Weir, David,i1947- [Verfasser]

Albany : State University of New York Press, 2008

Birmingham, AL, USA : EBSCO Industries, Inc.

1 Online-Ressource (xxii, 233 pages) : Illustrations, maps

SUNY series, studies in the long nineteenth century

Includes bibliographical references (pages 203-222) and index

978-1-4356-3296-7 ; 1-4356-3296-6 ; 978-0-7914-7277-4

HT 1740

 

USA  Kunst  Kultur  Dekadenz  Geschichte 1890-1926 

"Decadent Culture in the United States traces the development of the decadent movement in America from its beginnings in the 1890s to its brief revival in the 1920s. During the fin de siecle, many Americans felt the nation had entered a period of decline since the frontier had ended and the country's "manifest destiny" seemed to be fulfilled. Decadence - the cultural response to national decline and individual degeneracy so familiar in nineteenth-century Europe - was thus taken up by groups of artists and writers in major American cities such as New York, Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco. Noting that the capitalist, commercial context of America provided possibilities for the entrance of decadence into popular culture to a degree that simply did not occur in Europe, David Weir argues that American-style decadence was driven by a dual impulse: away from popular culture for ideological reasons, yet toward popular culture for economic reasons. By going against the grain of dominant social and cultural trends, American writers produced a native variant of Continental Decadence that eventually dissipated "upward" into the rising leisure class and "downward" into popular, commercial culture."--Jacket.