Chapter 1 - US Literature and the Modern Right at Midcentury

Summary

Focusing on the birth of the postwar era to the early 1960s, this chapter reconstructs the widely held critical view that even though New Deal liberalism was the dominant political order in the United States, the most celebrated literature of the period was derived from Anglophone modernism, an aesthetic movement embodied by writers including T. S. Eliot, William Faulkner, and Ezra Pound, whom prominent critics such as Lionel Trilling perceived as anti-liberal at best and reactionary at worst. The chapter also reveals how the correlation between highbrow literature and conservative politics accorded not only with the early conservative movement’s neo-Burkean conception of empirical complexity over abstraction, but also the carefully cultivated self-image conservatives had of themselves as guardians of high literary culture.