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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Decadent Culture in the United States: Art and Literature against the American Grain, 1890-1926

Decadent Culture in the United States: Art and Literature against the American Grain, 1890-1926

Weir, David

Paperback

Series: SUNY Series, Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century

American Art - GeneralGeneral ArtArt & Popular Culture

ISBN10: 0791472787
ISBN13: 9780791472781
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: Jan 8 2009
Pages: 256
Weight: 0.79
Height: 0.60 Width: 6.48 Depth: 8.96
Language: English

The paradoxes of the American decadent movement in the 1890s and 1920s.

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 siècle, 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.

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