The Conservative Aesthetic
eBook - PDF

The Conservative Aesthetic

Theodore Roosevelt, Popular Darwinism, and the American Literary West

  1. 365 pages
  2. English
  3. PDF
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

The Conservative Aesthetic

Theodore Roosevelt, Popular Darwinism, and the American Literary West

About this book

The Conservative Aesthetic: Theodore Roosevelt, Popular Darwinism, and the American Literary West offers an alternative origin story for American conservatism, tracing it to a circle of writers, artists, and thinkers in the late nineteenth century who yoked popular understandings of Darwin to western literary aesthetics. That circle included writer Owen Wister, artist Frederic Remington, entertainer William "Buffalo Bill" Cody, historian Frederick Jackson Turner, and a young Theodore Roosevelt. The book explores how their lives and their writing intertwined with their conservative sensibilities. For them, going west was akin to time travel, a retrogression into an earlier and hardier age. It was through those retrogressions into the American state of nature, they imagined, that society could discover its finest and fittest citizens. Such a society would be the modern realization of Thomas Jefferson's century-old dream of a "natural aristocracy." Theirs was a new conservatism, rooted not in a history of European monarchy but rather in stories about American individualism and the frontier west, updated for the age of Darwin.

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Information

Publisher
Lexington Books
Year
2021
eBook ISBN
9781978788657
Edition
1
Topic
Literature
Subtopic
Modern Literary Criticism
Index
Literature

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. The Conservative Aesthetic
  3. The Conservative Aesthetic: Theodore Roosevelt, Popular Darwinism, and the American Literary West
  4. Copyright
  5. Contents
  6. Preface
  7. Acknowledgments
  8. Introduction
  9. Part I Gentlemen of the West (1880ā€“1884)
  10. Chapter 1
  11. Roosevelt in the Badlands
  12. Chapter 2
  13. Wister Goes West
  14. Chapter 3
  15. Frederic Remingtonā€™s Vanishing West
  16. Chapter 4
  17. A Self-Made Man
  18. Chapter 5
  19. Remington and the Art of Scientific Representation
  20. Chapter 6
  21. Wisterā€™s Legal Education
  22. Chapter 7
  23. ā€œBuffalo Billā€ Cody and the Selling of the West
  24. Part II The Early History of Conservatism (1689ā€“1880)
  25. Chapter 8
  26. The Nature of Freedom
  27. Chapter 9
  28. Emersonā€™s Great Man Theory of History
  29. Chapter 10
  30. Darwin Comes to America
  31. Chapter 11
  32. The Redeemers, the Socialists, and Conservatism After the Civil War
  33. Part III Selling a Darwinian West (1884ā€“1890)
  34. Chapter 12
  35. Equal to All Occasions
  36. Chapter 13
  37. Cody and the Queen
  38. Chapter 14
  39. The Cowboy of Dakota
  40. Chapter 15
  41. Remingtonā€™s Great White West
  42. Chapter 16
  43. Natural Inequality and the Course of Progress
  44. Chapter 17
  45. The Ghost Dance
  46. Part IV In Search of a Practical History (1890ā€“1895)
  47. Chapter 18
  48. The Johnson County War
  49. Chapter 19
  50. The Worldā€™s Columbian Exposition
  51. Chapter 20
  52. The Boone and Crockett Club
  53. Chapter 21
  54. Environmental Conservation and Political Conservatism
  55. Chapter 22
  56. The Science of Western History
  57. Chapter 23
  58. A Practical Conservatism
  59. Chapter 24
  60. The Evolution of a Cowboy
  61. Chapter 25
  62. The Bronco Busters
  63. Chapter 26
  64. Progress, Populism, and the Lure of War
  65. Part V Cuba and the New West (1896ā€“1902)
  66. Chapter 27
  67. The Rush of War
  68. Chapter 28
  69. The Cowboy Regiment Abroad
  70. Chapter 29
  71. Rewriting a Legacy
  72. Chapter 30
  73. The Virginian and the White House
  74. Epilogue
  75. Works Cited
  76. Index
  77. About the Author