Description: Introduces the major cultural and intellectual trends of the decade by introducing and assessing the development of the primary cultural forms: namely, Fiction, Poetry and Drama, Music and Performance, Film and Radio, and Visual Art and Design. A fifth chapter focuses on the unprecedented rise in the 1920s of Leisure and Consumption.
Brief description: Susan Currell is a Senior Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Sussex. She is author of The March of Spare Time: The Problem and Promise of Leisure During the 1930s (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005) and co-editor of Popular Eugenics: National Efficiency and American Mass Culture (University of Ohio Press, 2006).
Review Quotes: Both thoughtful and useful, Susan Currell's American Culture in the 1920s combines summatory accounts of intellectual, political, cultural and aesthetic trends with illuminating case-studies that range from close readings of particular texts through genre surveys and exhibition reviews to coverage of key or typical careers. Currell's version of the decade turns on a record of pervasive tensions between tradition and innovation, and is particularly strong on the passage of intellectual trends into popular and political theories conditioning the daily cultural life of the decade. I can think of few other introductions that so aptly catch the degree to which modernity is necessarily unfinished, unfinishable and conflicted.--Professor Richard Godden, University of California, Irvine