Structures of the Jazz Age: Mass Culture, Progressive Education and Racial Disclosures in American Modernism
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
