BiblioVault - Books about Twenties

Classicism of the Twenties: Art, Music, and Literature
Theodore Ziolkowski
University of Chicago Press, 2014
Library of Congress NX180.C5Z56 2015 | Dewey Decimal 700.414209042

The triumph of avant-gardes in the 1920s tends to dominate our discussions of the music, art, and literature of the period. But the broader current of modernism encompassed many movements, and one of the most distinct and influential was a turn to classicism.

In Classicism of the Twenties, Theodore Ziolkowski offers a compelling account of that movement. Giving equal attention to music, art, and literature, and focusing in particular on the works of Stravinsky, Picasso, and T. S. Eliot, he shows how the turn to classicism manifested itself. In reaction both to the excesses of neoromanticism and early modernism and to the horrors of World War I—and with respectful detachment—artists, writers, and composers adapted themes and forms from the past and tried to imbue their own works with the values of simplicity and order that epitomized earlier classicisms.

By identifying elements common to all three arts, and carefully situating classicism within the broader sweep of modernist movements, Ziolkowski presents a refreshingly original view of the cultural life of the 1920s.

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Dancing Fools and Weary Blues: The Great Escape of the Twenties
Edited by Lawrence R. Broer and John D. Walther
University of Wisconsin Press, 1990
Library of Congress E169.1.D25 1990 | Dewey Decimal 973.9

Often, the decade of the 1920s has been stereotyped with such labels as “The Roaring Twenties,” “The Jazz Age,” or “The Lost Generation.” Historical perspective has forced reevaluation of this decade. Articles in this collection are presented in the most definitive anthology dealing with 1920s America.
The contributors have put aside stereotypes to offer a valuable critique of the American dream during a time of major crises. Dancing Fools and Weary Blues also presents its readers a picture of the continual redemption and revitalization of that dream, and reasserts its basic democratic values.

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Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and the Twenties
Ronald Berman
University of Alabama Press, 2002
Library of Congress PS3511.I9Z55774 2001 | Dewey Decimal 813.5209

A noted scholar offers fresh ways of looking at two legendary American authors.

Both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway came into their own in the 1920s and did some of their best writing during that decade. In a series of interrelated essays, Ronald Berman considers an array of novels and short stories by both authors within the context of the decade's popular culture, philosophy, and intellectual history. As Berman shows, the thought of Fitzgerald and Hemingway went considerably past the limits of such labels as the Jazz Age or the Lost Generation.

Both Fitzgerald and Hemingway were avid readers, alive to the intellectual currents of their day, especially the contradictions and clashes of ideas and ideologies. Both writers, for example, were very much concerned with the problem of untenable belief—and also with the need to believe. In this light, Berman offers fresh readings of such works as Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, "Bernice Bobs Her Hair," and "The Diamond as Big as the Ritz" and Hemingway's "The Killers," A Farewell to Arms, and The Sun Also Rises. Berman invokes the thinking of a wide range of writers in his considerations of these texts, including William James, Alfred North Whitehead, Walter Lippman, and Edmund Wilson.

Berman's essays are driven and connected by a focused line of inquiry into Fitzgerald's and Hemingway's concerns with dogma both religious and secular, with new and old ideas of selfhood,and, particularly in the case of Hemingway, with the way we understand, explain, and transmit experience.

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Lesbian Empire: Radical Crosswriting in the Twenties
Wachman, Gay
Rutgers University Press, 2001
Library of Congress PR888.L46W34 2001 | Dewey Decimal 823.912099206643

Gay Wachman provides a critical new reading of sexually radical fiction by British women in the years during and after the First World War. She contrasts works by Sylvia Townsend Warner, Virginia Woolf, Rose Allatini, and Evadne Price with more politically and narratively conservative novels by Radclyffe Hall and Clemence Dane. These writers, she states, formed part of an alternative modernist tradition that functioned both within and against the repressive ideology of the British Empire, using fantasy as a means of reshaping and critiquing a world fragmented by war.

Wachman places at the center of this tradition Sylvia Townsend Warner's achievement in undermining the inhibitions that faced women writing about forbidden love. She discusses Warner's use of crosswriting to transpose the otherwise unrepresentable lives of invisible lesbians into narratives about gay men, destabilizing the borders of race, class, and gender and challenging the codes of expression on which imperialist patriarchy and capitalism depended.

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Next-Generation Leadership: A Toolkit for Those in Their Teens, Twenties, & Thirties, Who Want to be Successful Leaders
William J. Byron
University of Scranton Press, 2010
Library of Congress BX2355.B97 2010 | Dewey Decimal 253.088282

Drawing on his five decades of leadership experience, William Byron outlines in this volume the theory, practice, and purpose of leadership. Intuition, humility, empathy, simplicity of lifestyle, and sound speaking and writing skills are all essential for effective leadership, and Byron devotes separate, in-depth chapters to each. Aimed at an audience now largely overlooked by leadership literature, Next Generation Leadership will appeal to the business, government, religion, and nonprofit leaders of tomorrow.

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