The career of Constance Rourke (1885-1941) is one of the richest
examples of the American writer's search for a "usable past." In
this first full-length study of Rourke, Joan Shelley Rubin
establishes the context for Rourke's defense of American culture --
the controversies that engaged her, the books that influenced her
thinking, the premises that lay beneath her vocabulary.
With the aid of Rourke's unpublished papers, the author explores
her responses to issues that were compelling for her generation of
intellectuals: the critique of America as materialistic and
provincial; the demand for native traditions in the arts; the
modern understanding of the nature of culture and myth; and the
question of a critic's role in a democracy.
Rourke's writings demonstrate that America did not suffer, as Van
Wyck Brooks and others had maintained, from a damaging split
between "high-brow" and "low-brow" but was rather a rich, unified
culture in which the arts could thrive. Her classic "American
Humor" (1931) and her biographies of Lotta Crabtree, Davy Crockett,
Audubon, and Charles Sheeler celebrate the American as mythmaker.
To foster what she called the "possession" of the national
heritage, she used an evocative prose style accessible to a wide
audience and depicted the frontier in more abstract terms than did
other contempoaray scholars. Her commitment to social reform,
acquired in her youth and strengthened at Vassar in the Progressive
era, informed her sense of the function of criticism and guided her
political activites in the 1930s.
Drawing together Rourke's varied discussions of popular heroes,
comic lore, literature, and art, Rubin illuminates the delicate
balances and sometimes contradictory arguments underlying Rourke's
description of America's cultural patterns. She also analyzes the
way Rourke's encounters with the ideas of Van Wyck Brooks, Ruth
Benedict, Jane Harrison, Bernard DeVoto, and Lewis Mumford shaped
her view of America's achievements and possibilities.
Rourke emerges not simply as a follower of Brooks or as a colleague
of De Voto, nor even as an antiquarian or folklorist. Rather, she
assumes her own unique and proper place -- as a pioneer who, more
than anyone else of her day, boldly and eloquently showed Americans
that they had the resources necessary for the future of both art
and society. By placing Constance Rourke within the framework of a
debate about the nature of American culture, the author makes a
notable contribution to American intellectual history.
Originally published in 1980.
A UNC Press Enduring Edition -- UNC Press Enduring Editions use the
latest in digital technology to make available again books from our
distinguished backlist that were previously out of print. These
editions are published unaltered from the original, and are
presented in affordable paperback formats, bringing readers both
historical and cultural value.
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