Full Description
First published in 1981, T. J. Jackson Lears's No Place of Grace is a landmark book in American studies and American history, acclaimed for both its rigorous research and the deft fluidity of its prose. A study of responses to the emergent culture of corporate capitalism at the turn of the twentieth century, No Place of Grace charts the development of contemporary consumer society through the embrace of antimodernism—the effort among middle- and upper-class Americans to recapture feelings of authentic experience. Rather than offer true resistance to the increasingly corporatized bureaucracy of the time, however, antimodernism helped accommodate Americans to the new order—it was therapeutic rather than oppositional, a striking forerunner to today's self-help culture. And yet antimodernism contributed a new dynamic as well, "an eloquent edge of protest," as Lears puts it, which is evident even today in anticonsumerism, sustainable living, and other practices. This new edition, with a lively and discerning foreword by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen, celebrates the fortieth anniversary of this singular work of history.
Contents
Foreword by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen
Preface (1994)
Preface
Acknowledgments
1. Roots of Antimodernism: The Crisis of Cultural Authority during the Late Nineteenth Century
A Pattern of Evasive Banality: Official Modern Culture in Industrial America
A Social Crisis: The Republican Tradition and the Radical Specter
Unreal City: Social Science, Secularization, and the Emergence of Weightlessness
Psychic Crisis: Neurasthenia and the Emergence of a Therapeutic World View
2. The Figure of the Artisan: Arts and Crafts Ideology
Origins of the American Craft Revival: Persons and Perceptions
Revitalization and Transformation in Arts and Crafts Ideology: The Simple Life, Aestheticism, Educational Reform
Reversing Antimodernism: The Factory, the Market, and the Process of Rationalization
The Fate of the Craft Ideal
3. The Destructive Element: Modern Commercial Society and the Martial Ideal
From Domestic Realism to "Real Life"
Class, Race, and the Worship of Force
The Psychological Uses of the Martial Ideal: The Cult of Experience and the Quest for Authentic Selfhood
The Psychological Uses of the Martial Ideal: Guiney, Norris, Adams
4. The Morning of Belief: Medieval Mentalities in a Modern World
The Image of Childhood and the Childhood of the Race
Medieval Sincerity: Genteel and Robust
Medieval Vitality: The Erotic Union of Sacred and Profane
The Medieval Unconscious: Therapy and Protest
5. The Religion of Beauty: Catholic Forms and American Consciousness
The Rise of Catholic Taste: Cultural Authority and Personal Regeneration
Art, Ritual, and Belief: The Protestant Dilemma
American Anglo-Catholicism: Legitimation and Protest
The Poles of Anglicanism: Cram and Scudder
6. From Patriarchy to Nirvana: Patterns of Ambivalence
The Problem of Victorian Ambivalence: Sources and Solutions
The Lotus and the Father: Bigelow, Lowell, Lodge
William Sturgis Bigelow
Percival Lowell
George Cabot Lodge
Aesthetic Catholicism and "Feminine" Values: Norton, Hall, Brooks
Charles Eliot Norton
G. Stanley Hall
Van Wyck Brooks
7. From Filial Loyalty to Religious Protest: Henry Adams
Early Manhood: The Meandering Track of the Family Go-Cart
Husband, Historian, Novelist: Adams's Crisis of Generativity
The Antimodern Quest: From Niagara to the Virgin
Between Father and Mother, I: The Virgin, the Dynamo, and the Angelic Doctor
Between Father and Mother, II: The Antimodern Modernist
Epilogue
Biographical Appendix
Notes
Index
