Stephen J. Mexal's Books

The Conservative Aesthetic

Theodore Roosevelt, Popular Darwinism, and the American Literary West

By: Stephen J. Mexal

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The Conservative Aesthetic

Theodore Roosevelt, Popular Darwinism, and the American Literary West

By: Stephen J. Mexal

The Conservative Aesthetic: Theodore Roosevelt, Popular Darwinism, and the American Literary West offers an alternative origin story for American conservatism, tracing it to a circle of writers, artists, and thinkers in the late nineteenth century who yoked popular understandings of Darwin to western literary aesthetics. That circle included writer Owen Wister, artist Frederic Remington, entertainer William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, historian Frederick Jackson Turner, and a young Theodore Roosevelt. The book explores how their lives and their writing intertwined with their conservative sensibilities. For them, going west was akin to time travel, a retrogression into an earlier and hardier age. It was through those retrogressions into the American state of nature, they imagined, that society could discover its finest and fittest citizens. Such a society would be the modern realization of Thomas Jefferson’s century-old dream of a “natural aristocracy.” Theirs was a new conservatism, rooted not in a history of European monarchy but rather in stories about American individualism and the frontier west, updated for the age of Darwin.

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Page Count

365

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield

Published Date

ISBN 10

1793632626

ISBN 13

9781793632623

Reading for Liberalism

The Overland Monthly and the Writing of the Modern American West

By: Stephen J. Mexal

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Reading for Liberalism

The Overland Monthly and the Writing of the Modern American West

By: Stephen J. Mexal

Founded in 1868, the Overland Monthly was a San Francisco–based literary magazine whose mix of humor, pathos, and romantic nostalgia for a lost frontier was an immediate sensation on the East Coast. Due in part to a regional desire to attract settlers and financial investment, the essays and short fiction published in the Overland Monthly often portrayed the American West as a civilized evolution of, and not a savage regression from, eastern bourgeois modernity and democracy. Stories about the American West have for centuries been integral to the way we imagine freedom, the individual, and the possibility for alternate political realities. Reading for Liberalism examines the shifting literary and narrative construction of liberal selfhood in California in the late nineteenth century through case studies of a number of western American writers who wrote for the Overland Monthly, including Noah Brooks, Ina Coolbrith, Bret Harte, Jack London, John Muir, and Frank Norris, among others. Reading for Liberalism argues that Harte, the magazine’s founding editor, and the other members of the Overland group critiqued and reimagined the often invisible fabric of American freedom. Reading for Liberalism uncovers and examines in the text of the Overland Monthly the relationship between wilderness, literature, race, and the production of individual freedom in late nineteenth-century California.

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Page Count

381

Publisher

U of Nebraska Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1496211340

ISBN 13

9781496211347

Reading for Liberalism

The Overland Monthly and the Writing of the Modern American West

By: Stephen J. Mexal

Write a review Read reviews Take a Quiz Solve Book Puzzle

Reading for Liberalism

The Overland Monthly and the Writing of the Modern American West

By: Stephen J. Mexal

Average ratings

N/A

Write a review

Solve jigsaw puzzle

Age

Page Count

381

Publisher

U of Nebraska Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1496211340

ISBN 13

9781496211347

Book's by Stephen J. Mexal

The Conservative Aesthetic

The Conservative Aesthetic

Reading for Liberalism

Reading for Liberalism

Reading for Liberalism

Reading for Liberalism

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