Aestheticism: A nineteenth-century movement
in art and literature that advocated the credo of “Art for
Art’s Sake.” Beauty became the basic principle of
life, the source of all other principles, including moral ones.
Art was superior to nature; death and beauty were significantly
intertwined; and intensity of experience was emphasized.
American Adam: The image “of the authentic
American as a figure of heroic innocence and vast potentialities
at the start of a new history. [. . . T]his image had about it
always an air of adventurousness, a sense of promise and possibility”
(Lewis 1).
Decadence: A late nineteenth-century movement
in art and literature that emphasized Aestheticism, sought to
escape the human condition by artifice and “evil,”
and, alternately, pursued sensation and cultivated a mood of ennui.
Edenic Myth: The belief that the “discovery”
of a “New World”—a new Eden—“was
a providential blessing” that offered “new starts
and new hopes for the human race.” In the pristine environs
of America, it was argued, the new settlers “might experience
a rebirth into innocence, simplicity, [. . . and] primal sweetness”
(Cunliff 2).
Fin de Siècle: French phrase meaning
“end of century,” sometimes used to refer to the Aesthetes
or the Decadents of the late nineteenth century.
Gilded Age: This phrase comes from Mark Twain
and Charles Dudley Warner’s 1873 novel The Gilded Age,
depicting “an American society that, despite its appearance
of promise and prosperity, is riddled with corruption and scandal”
(http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/lectures/lecture04.html).
New Woman: The “New Woman” of the
nineteenth century replaced the earlier nineteenth-century concept
of the “True Woman,” a product of the “Cult
of Domesticity.” “Less constrained by Victorian norms
and domesticity than previous generations, the new woman had greater
freedom to pursue public roles and even flaunt her ‘sex
appeal,’ a term coined in the 1920s and linked with the
emergence of the new woman. She challenged conventional gender
roles and met with hostility from men and women who objected to
women’s public presence and supposed decline in morality.
Expressing autonomy and individuality, the new woman represented
the tendency of young women at the turn of the century to reject
their mothers’ ways in favor of new, modern choices”
(click
here).
West: For many nineteenth- and twentieth-century
Americans, and for historians and critics until recently, the
“American West symbolized movement. There were several
successive Wests.” The “true symbolic meaning of
the West”
was “not its absorption of civilization but its atmosphere
of adventurous openness.” In other words, the West “had
an abstract function for nineteenth-century literature,”
and the Western mood was “robust” (Cunliffe 16-20)
in a land of opportunity, with ever-expanding borders. Recent
“New West” historians and literary critics, however,
see the West very differently, decrying idealized frontiers,
focusing
upon the encounters of diverse peoples, including the marginalized
and the oppressed, and examining environmental concerns. See
Frederic
Jackson Turner, especially, for the earlier frontier thesis;
Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde A. Milner II, and Charles E.
Rankin, eds.,
Trails: Toward a New Western History (Lawrence: U of
Kansas, 1991) for an excellent collection on recent Western
historiography;
and Laurie Kovacovic, “An Annotated Bibliography of the
American Frontier Heritage,” http://www.d.umn.edu/cla/faculty/tbacig/urop/bibtrner.html
for many other resources.
Cunliffe, Marcus. “The Conditions of an American Literatre.”
American Literature to 1900. Ed. Marcus Cunliffe. New
York: Penguin, 1986. 1-22.
“The Gilded Age and the Politics of Corruption.”
American History 102: Civil War to the Present. 20 August
2002 <http://us.history.wisc.edu/hist102/lectures/lecture04.html>.
Lewis, R. W. B. The American Adam. Chicago: U of Chicago
P, 1955.
“The New Woman.” Clash of Cultures in the 1910s
and 1920s. Ohio State U Dept. of History. 11 August 2002
(Click
Here).
