| The American fin de siecle experienced a small but extremely significant reaction among the educated and the elite against the Gilded Age ideology of faith in American political, social, and economic institutions. This oppositional trend, which can be termed cultural radicalism, is represented by writers who rejected the ideals of the dominant literacy culture, including the cult of moral and material progress, a faith in democracy, well-defined gender roles, and a generally optimistic vision of American life. Ambrose Bierce, Lafcadio Hearn, Edgar Saltus, and certain contributors to the little magazines, especially James Gibbons Huneker and Vance Thompson, saw themselves as having more in common with the aesthetes and decadents of Europe than with mainstream American literary realists. They also formed a generational bridge between the Dark Romantics of the 1840s and 1850s and the Lost Generation of the 1920s.;These cultural radicals shared a belief in art for art's sake and also displayed an impulse toward cynicism, decadence, and dissent. As journalists they also participated in the rise of the popular press at the end of the century. Because they sought to join life and art, their biography is as significant as their literary production. Alienated from their environment, they wanted to isolate themselves in a sphere where art could be kept pure, beautiful, and free of contaminating didacticism. At the same time, they were acutely aware of increasing social and economic dislocations, of the failure of the American dream. Their cultural radicalism encompassed both aesthetic experimentation and political dissent, but art, they believed should not serve as a revolutionary force.;Cultural radicalism, as demonstrated by the lives and works of these writers, originated not in the second decade of twentieth century, as previous commentators have argued, but in the last decade of the nineteenth; in fact, the term has not before been applied to this particular group of fin-de-siecle writers. These writers have been marginalized and excluded from the canon because of their political and aesthetic divergence from the dominant literary culture. They emerge divergence from the dominant literary culture. They emerge as the true precursors of modernism in America. |
