Book Alert / Decadent Culture in the United States

Decadent Culture in the United States -- Art and Literature Against The American Grain, 1890-1926 by David Weir, SUNY Press '08, 233 pages, ISBN #0791472779. Index, source notes, b&w images sprinkled through text.

"During the fin de siecle," writes Professor Weir, "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." Americans had watched their European cousins' adopt decadence as its cultural response to national decline and individual degeneracy, and gradually, American artists and writers adopted the same response to what was happening in the United States. "To be decadent," Weir observes, "one would have to develop an attitude of knowing acceptance of the prospect of collective ruin while also accepting or even relishing personal degeneration."

What differed from the European experience, he says, was America's "capitalist, commercial context," which made it easier for decadence to enter popular culture than in Europe. "American-style decadence was driven by a dual impulse: away from popular culture for ideological reasons, yet toward popular culture for economic reasons."

David Weir is professor of comparative literature at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.