Auspicious radical history: cogently argued, crisply written, and
alive with intellectual passion - even if the facts occasionally
buckle beneath Lears' enormous thesis. Lears surveys the life and
work of some three-score artists, intellectuals, ministers,
reformers, etc., from Brooks and Henry Adams to Edith Wharton, who
around the end of the 19th century suffered from the malaise of
American modernity and struggled to overcome it, In a sense these
people, mostly wealthy, well-educated Northern WASPs, are Lears'
fathers and mothers in the faith, since they resisted the ugliness,
incoherence, brutality, and soulless rationality of a world run by
and for "specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart"
(Max Weber). And Lears examines, with splendid scholarly breadth,
the many forms this resistance took: the American craft revival,
the martial ideal, the cult of the Middle Ages, enthusiasm for
Catholic art and theology and a whole assortment of "feminine"
values (in protest aginst both personal Oedipal pressures and the
destructive hypermasculinity of industrial society). But the ironic
issue of most antimodernist activity - and this is more than Lears
can completely convince us of - was "the revitalization and
transformation of their class's cultural hegemony." Certainly Lears
is right to connect fin de siecle aestheticism, the mind-cure
movement, and the frustrated mystical impulses of figures like
Laura Scudder and William Sturgis Bigelow with the later "triumph
of the therapeutic"; and he effectively scores points against the
antimodernist seekers of "inner experience" for "reinforcing the .
. . banality they had intended to escape." But can Lears show that
his band of unhappy souls, some of them quite obscure, were that
important an influence? In any event he praises the (few)
antimodernists who, like his hero Henry Adams, were not co-opted by
the capitalist/consumerist system or fooled by the "flatulent
pieties of our progressive creed" or side-tracked into the nirvana
of "self-fulfillment." As Adams' writings stress, the issue was at
bottom religious: how to resolve, without deceiving or dehumanizing
oneself, the dialectic between the Dynamo and the Virgin? Lears
will have to strengthen his case, but the young professor from the
Univ. of Missouri has made a very impressive debut. (Kirkus
Reviews)
T. J. Jackson Lears draws on a wealth of primary sources --
sermons, diaries, letters -- as well as novels, poems, and essays
to explore the origins of turn-of-the-century American
antimodernism. He examines the retreat to the exotic, the pursuit
of intense physical or spiritual experiences, and the search for
cultural self-sufficiency through the Arts and Crafts movement.
Lears argues that their antimodern impulse, more pervasive than
historians have supposed, was not "simple escapism," but reveals
some enduring and recurring tensions in American culture.
"It's an understatement to call "No Place of Grace" a brilliant
book. . . . It's the first clear sign I've seen that my generation,
after marching through the '60s and jogging through the '70s might
be pausing to examine what we've learned, and to teach it."--Walter
Kendrick, "Village Voice"
"One can justly make the claim that "No Place of Grace" restores
and reinterprets a crucial part of American history. Lears's method
is impeccable."--Ann Douglas, "The Nation"
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