Casey Nelson Blake's Books

Beloved Community

The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford

By: Casey Nelson Blake

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Beloved Community

The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford

By: Casey Nelson Blake

The "Young American" critics -- Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford -- are well known as central figures in the Greenwich Village "Little Renaissance" of the 1910s and in the postwar debates about American culture and politics. In Beloved Community, Casey Blake considers these intellectuals as a coherant group and assesses the connection between thier cultural criticisms and their attempts to forge a communitarian alternative to liberal and socialist poitics. Blake draws on biography to emphasize the intersection of questions of self, culture, and society in their calls for a culture of "personality" and "self-fulfillment." In contrast to the tendency of previous analyses to separate these critics' cultural and autobiographical writings from their politics, Blake argues that their cultural criticism grew out of a radical vision of self-realization through participation in a democratic culture and polity. He also examines the Young American writers' interpretations of such turn-of-the-century radicals as William Morris, Henry George, John Dewey, and Patrick Geddes and shows that this adversary tradition still offers important insights into contemporary issues in American politics and culture. Beloved Community reestablishes the democratic content of the Young Americans' ideal of "personality" and argues against viewing a monolithic therapeutic culture as the sole successor to a Victorian "culture of character." The politics of selfhood that was so critical to the Young Americans' project has remained a contested terrain throughout the twentieth century.

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385

Publisher

Univ of North Carolina Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807860425

ISBN 13

9780807860427

At the Center

American Thought and Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century

By: Casey Nelson Blake,Daniel H. Borus,Howard Brick

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At the Center

American Thought and Culture in the Mid-Twentieth Century

By: Casey Nelson Blake,Daniel H. Borus,Howard Brick

At a time when American political and cultural leaders asserted that the nation stood at “the center of world awareness,” thinkers and artists sought to understand and secure principles that lay at the center of things. From the onset of the Cold War in 1948 through 1963, they asked: What defined the essential character of “American culture”? Could permanent moral standards guide human conduct amid the flux and horrors of history? In what ways did a stable self emerge through the life cycle? Could scientific method rescue truth from error, illusion, and myth? Are there key elements to democracy, to the integrity of a society, to order in the world? Answers to such questions promised intellectual and moral stability in an age haunted by the memory of world war and the possibility of future devastation on an even greater scale. Yet other key figures rejected the search for a center, asserting that freedom lay in the dispersion of cultural energies and the plurality of American experiences. In probing the centering impulse of the era, At the Center offers a unique perspective on the United States at the pinnacle of its power.

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359

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield

Published Date

ISBN 10

1442226765

ISBN 13

9781442226760

Beloved Community

The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford

By: Casey Nelson Blake

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Beloved Community

The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford

By: Casey Nelson Blake

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

385

Publisher

Univ of North Carolina Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0807860425

ISBN 13

9780807860427

Book's by Casey Nelson Blake

Beloved Community

Beloved Community

At the Center

At the Center

Beloved Community

Beloved Community

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