Structures of the Jazz Age: Mass Culture, Progressive Education and Racial Disclosures in American Modernism (Haymarket Series) - Hardcover

Rhodes, Chip

3.17

6 ratings by Goodreads

9781859848333: Structures of the Jazz Age: Mass Culture, Progressive Education and Racial Disclosures in American Modernism (Haymarket Series)

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1859848338 ISBN 13: 9781859848333

Publisher: Verso, 1998

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Unraveling the cultural and intellectual landscape of 1920s America. Structures of the Jazz Age charts the twenties cultural landscape populated by critical intellectuals like H.L. Mencken and Irving Babbitt, and by major imaginative writers like Dos Passos, Cather and Dreiser. In an original and readable book, Chip Rhodes grants the truth of appearances to the cliches of the Jazz Age which have held the American imagination—the lost generation of writers, the era of mass consumption and the silver screen—whilst revealing their roots in a conservative ideology. Rhodes also looks beyond the mainstream to more marginal schools of thought, including progressive educational philosophy, the critique of mass culture, and the cult of primitivism exemplified in less canonized figures like Anzia Yezierska, Harry Leon Wilson and DuBose Heyward. He shows how these different strands were woven together in a way that helped to sustain Republican rule and an expanding economy, until the entire edifice came tumbling down in the stock market crash of 1929

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About the Author:

Chip Rhodes is Assistant Professor of American Literature at Colorado State University and is currently working on a book on modern American poetry.

Review:

“Did writers of the 1920s resign from history? Did their decade interrupt the main continuities of American culture? No and no, says chip Rhodes. In this comprehensive and highly original study, he looks deeply into the political economy of the time, reunites it with culture, and produces fine studies of both canonical and half-remembered writers. The twenties will never look the same again.”—Richard Ohmann

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