Beloved Community

The “Young American” critics — Randolph Bourne Van Wyck Brooks Waldo Frank and Lewis Mumford — are well known as central figures in the Greenwich Village “Little Renaissance” of the 1910s and in the postwar debates about American culture and politics. In <i>Beloved Community</i> Casey Blake considers these intellectuals as a coherant group and assesses the connection between thier cultural criticisms and their attempts to forge a communitarian alternative to liberal and socialist poitics.<br/><br/>Blake draws on biography to emphasize the intersection of questions of self culture and society in their calls for a culture of “personality” and “self-fulfillment.” In contrast to the tendency of previous analyses to separate these critics' cultural and autobiographical writings from their politics Blake argues that their cultural criticism grew out of a radical vision of self-realization through participation in a democratic culture and polity. He also examines the Young American writers' interpretations of such turn-of-the-century radicals as William Morris Henry George John Dewey and Patrick Geddes and shows that this adversary tradition still offers important insights into contemporary issues in American politics and culture.<br/><br/><i>Beloved Community</i> reestablishes the democratic content of the Young Americans' ideal of “personality” and argues against viewing a monolithic therapeutic culture as the sole successor to a Victorian “culture of character.” The politics of selfhood that was so critical to the Young Americans' project has remained a contested terrain throughout the twentieth century.