Kate Hext and Alex Murray are two of the leading figures in the study of literature and the arts in and around the fin de siècle, the period during which the aesthetic as a value in and of itself was most promoted. They have produced a number of works on this period together, including the edited collections Decadence in the Age of Modernism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2019) and The Oxford Handbook to Oscar Wilde (Oxford University Press, 2025). Together with Kristin Mahoney of the University of Michigan, they are co-founders and co-editors of Cusp: Late 19th-/Early 20th-Century Cultures, which has become the flagship journal for the study of the period. Kate Hext’s most recent publication is Oscar Wilde in the Dream Factory: Decadence and Hollywood (Oxford University Press, 2024), and Alex Murray’s Decadent Conservatism: Aesthetics, Politics, and the Past (Oxford University Press, 2023).
It is not only their scholarly expertise but also their eloquent sensitivity to the importance of the aesthetic that led me to ask them to join me for a conversation online. I was interested in the relationship between the concept of decadence — a term which has by now been claimed as a scholarly field but which is not uncontested — and the older idea of aestheticism, about America’s relation to this formative period, and about their reflections on cultural diagnostics.
After a fashion it is no doubt a decadence; it has all the qualities that mark the end of great periods, the qualities that we find in the Greek, the Latin, decadence: an intense self-consciousness, a restless curiosity in research, an over-subtilizing refinement upon refinement, a spiritual and moral perversity, if what we call the classic is indeed the supreme art — those qualities of perfect simplicity, perfect sanity, perfect proportion, the supreme qualities — then this representative literature of to-day, interesting, beautiful as it is, is really a new and beautiful and interesting disease.
- Arthur Symons, “The Decadent Movement in Literature” (1893)
James Dowthwaite (JD): So I've got two of the definitive authors on decadence and it's a field of study that is an exciting place to be at the moment. Perhaps I could ask you, for people who aren't in this exciting place, what decadence means to you.
Kate Hext (KH): Alex?
Alex Murray (AM): I could spend the next few hours talking about this, but the two-minute answer is decadence names primarily two things. One is a literary tradition that we associate with France in the 1850s and 60s and England into the into the 1890s, which is stylistically ornate (some people call it artificial), is interested in trying to represent or to capture a culture that is characterized by perhaps exhaustion or anxiety, but also by radical change. And it's a literature that often is invested in the morbid, the perverse, the erotic. But it also then names a historiographical tendency, which is to imagine or to understand, that cultures go through processes of decline. So the culture itself can be analysed through an organic metaphor of birth, maturity, and then decline and death. And so you project these values onto culture and you anatomize a culture as being in a period of decadence, which means declining from a once vital state. This, of course is a nonsense. Cultures do no such thing, but it is obviously very useful for cultural critics to be able to label cultures as such. The two things are interrelated, but they're not necessarily causal.
Decadent writers don't have to ascribe to this view of cultural decline. Some of them challenge it, and some uphold it. And of course, you can say that any culture is in is in a period of decline. It doesn't have to have a literature which is characterized by these forms as well. You can say it about any cultural period. One could even say it about our own cultural period, but the value of saying it about any cultural period is moot.
KH: A lot of people do say that modern Western culture is “decadent,” of course. They're using the word “decadence” in a kind of generalized term to denote a culture that has demonstrably fallen away from its peak of progress and culture.
AM: Do you think it's our culture, Kate, or do you think it's our or is it something broader than culture?
KH: People — especially journalists and commentators — tend to use “decadence” to as a shorthand for what is wrong with Western culture. The Guardian, the Economist and the New York Times, are all newspapers that have recently featured “decadence” as a shorthand description for the compound of culture and politics — from Donald Trump and Elon Musk to Nigel Farage and British daytime TV — that defines the contemporary Western world. When they state that we are a culture is in a state of decadence they don't necessarily have a sense of the tradition that Alex has defined and that was celebrated by the writers and artists he and I have written on.
AM: Would you say it's a culture or a society in decline? Because often in The Economist it's being used as a sort of as a social diagnostic. These people might invoke cultural figures here and there, but they're really suggesting a sort of economic, social model of decline rather than a cultural one. I mean, that's my sense that when you kind of see it used by social critics.
KH: I think it's both: they’re inextricably connected. There is a symbiotic relationship between cultural decline through social media and the political decline illustrated by Trumpism and a broader turn to the political right, often fuelled by elements of the intellectual left. Because of this contemporary usage it can be difficult to see the decadent movement clearly. However, Alex is of course right about the terms of decadence and the way we use it as academics. The link between nineteenth-century decadence and the contemporary world that really interests me is individualism — specifically a modern kind of subjectivity that comes into being at the fin de siècle — within a decadent tradition. The decadent sensibility is always a venture or an adventure. It is a singular feeling that involves an almost anxious attentiveness to sensations. This sensibility emerges in the wake of Darwinian evolution, so in the second half of the nineteenth century. The mind trip, as in seemed to many, that life now must be reconceived without a God, without the surety of faith and the apparatus of society in progress was a catastrophe in its way. Decadence arises from the sense of needing and wanting to make life meaningful on new terms; terms centered around the individual and sensual experience. So I tend to think of decadence as it figures in the mind of the individual, who is trying to work out what it means to live under those conditions; the conditions of modernity. I think about Andre Gide’s idea in The Fruits of the Earth that the intense moment of sensual revelry gains a new significance because it's thrown up against the background of eternal death. In decadent writing and art there's a sense of euphoria and intense sensuality that is always understood in the context of decline, of death, and ultimate void. Decadent writers ping between — or don't ping because that would be too energetic! — they lounge between decline with its a sense of ennui and a sense of wanting to make the most of the moment as it passes, to borrow from Pater.
JD: I was going to ask about this. It’s not just in the White House or in establishment newspapers or journals that we hear a diagnosis that the West is in decline but also in the Kremlin. We often hear from Russian propaganda that the West is decadent, and I wonder if there might be a sense in which we could agree with Pater on this point alone that we are — hold on. No, not Pater. Putin!
KH: No one has ever in the history of the universe confused Putin and Pater. I love it.
AM: Please don't edit that out, James.
JD: No, I'm leaving that in.
AM: But now I’ve forgotten what the question was.
JD: Sorry, the question was whether Pater and Putin might be right that the West is decadent, even if one might endorse that judgement when the other uses it to condemn.
AM: Did Pater ever say that he was living in a decadent age?
HK: Pater, Putin, and Trump might think that the West was or is decadent but what they’d each mean by that would be different. At the same time, others would see them as manifestations of decadence. Having said which, Pater wouldn't have used the phrase “decadence,” albeit, in effect, he did believe that we were in a decadent age. Really, Pater himself is too energetic to be truly decadent: he's very Victorian about seeking pleasure; it's a sort of endeavor for him with a Victorian earnestness that he cannot leave behind even though he doesn't really believe in its basis anymore. It's left for others to interpret his Conclusion to Studies in the History of the Renaissance in a way that is decadent.
AM: I guess I would suggest that decadence comes along at a particular moment. You know, I'm thinking 1873, there's a great financial crash in America, and in Europe in particular. And there is this sense that a culture of dynamism and growth that from the birth of the industrial revolution through to 1873 has come to a sort of wane. And that sense of living in an age of precariousness, of financial volatility, I think, is one of the things that characterizes an age of anxiety which some people label as decadence. I don't believe in decadence at all as a concept, but I believe that anxiety can be diagnosed as such. So, I think that what happens at the moment is people are just labeling anxiety and the anxieties that we see are primarily economic. And I think that it's no great surprise that after 2008, I think you see the rise of decadence as a kind of cultural diagnostic which you didn't see before, that it certainly wasn't a term you saw much in the 1990s.
KH: No, I agree …
AM: But after 2008, people start using the language of decadence. And I think that in some senses, you know, it falls back into another period of — not just recession and depression economically, but of these sort of massive swings in financial structures. Fernand Braudel argues that there's these long patters of economic development that see material productivity — the production of commodities — give way to a reliance on financial markets to create growth, a process labelled financialization, and these periods of reliance on financial markets are autumnal; they presage the end of a cycle. And that one of those periods of decline was the late 19th century, when London's position as financial superpower was on the wane, and that they're moving more towards financialization. America was picking up this mantle. America was at the beginning of a period of growth, the start of the long 20th century in economic terms. And from the 1970s and 80s onwards, we've seen a massive economic shift more towards China, Korea, other countries, which I think do have a sense of maybe health and vitality in economic terms that then feeds into a broader culture. I think there's a claim that can be made for a sort of sense of economic entropy which leads to perceptions of social and cultural entropy which is characterising the West at the moment. Is it decadence? I'm not necessarily sure. I just think it's a consequence of economic shifts rather than as something essential in the culture.
KH: And then decadence as a concept is, as Alex says, so nebulous, which makes it applicable to lots of different things in lots of different ways, lots of different cultures. This makes it really ambiguous: it's something that one has to define when writing about decadence. So it's very tricky in that way and that trickiness also means that it's been picked up and weaponized as a way of resisting the dominant cultural modes. Take China for example: Oscar Wilde was influential and popular in China to resist the dominance of its early twentieth century culture. In Korea, under Japanese occupation, Salome was a talisman against oppression. It’s true of Wilde. It's usually Wilde who travels, of course. The point I’m making is that decadence is a collection of different values centered around individualism and sensuality that offer a way of not being like other people; not subscribing to the dominant cultural narrative of your time. In these cases, decline — that end-of-empire feeling we began with — becomes less important. In these cases, decadence is a statement that you don’t subscribe to the economic and cultural and social imperatives of the culture you are a part of.
JD: Earlier, in the 1990s for example, we might have still used the term aestheticism for a lot of what's covered by decadence now. And do you think that that term still has currency?
KH: I think it has much more currency than it is allowed to have. It is very unfortunate actually that as academics we have tended to the word the term “decadence” because it has become such a cachet in recent scholarship. When I say “academics” I should say that I include Alex and me. To give an example, we organized a conference in London in 2015 called “Aestheticism and Decadence in the Age of Modernism,” but when we developed a book based on that conference for Johns Hopkins University Press, we called it Decadence in the Age of Modernism. It was partly to slimline the title and partly just because we thought it was catchier, but partly because we were also reading the room on what academics were interested in. This all sounds quite sounds quite cynical, but we wanted people to read the book.
I think aestheticism captures Walter Pater though, to return to him. In the early years of the twentieth century, after Wilde's arrest, people talked about aestheticism and not decadence to distance themselves from the sexual deviancy of Wilde and The Yellow Book. However, they're not the same thing: aestheticism has different values. It is often broader and overlaps with Arts and Crafts, as well as with decadence. Aestheticism has a basis in Pre-Raphaelitism. So I think that we should revive the term in order to better comprehend the complex of artistic movements and values that were in currency in the late nineteenth century, but I don't see that that is likely to happen.
AM: On the aestheticism question, absolutely, I agree. And it is cynical, and I feel guilty that I've taken a significant role in the circulation of “decadence” as a critical term, when I think it's actually quite damaging and certainly distracting and helps us to fundamentally misread a lot of the literature of the fin de siècle. But I guess it was an easier shorthand to describe broader cultural production and I'm not sure that “aestheticism” would have allowed for the same sort of shorthand when it comes to discussing the plastic arts or discussing music or other forms. I think “aestheticism” is a critical term first and foremost, and I associate it with criticism, whereas I think decadence is something you can associate with style more easily. But I think in terms of aestheticism, I believe that it comes down to a question of values. And aestheticism is invested in the value of the arts and it makes claims for the value of art, not as they are socially subscribed, but as they inhere in the artwork. And as we encounter them we develop a sense of ethical value through that encounter with the artwork, whereas I'm not sure what decadent beliefs and values may be.
KH: Exactly.
AM: The decadent wants to refuse value and I think that's one of the problems: if you start using “decadent” as you fall into sort of nihilism, whereas I think aestheticism is deeply value oriented. But I think one of the problems with the ways in which it starts to be critiqued in the early years of the 20th century is that aestheticism and “art for art's sake” turns into a facile solipsism in the hands of people like Leavis and Richards and others, and they want to say that the only value of the work of art is social. And if it's not got social value, it's useless or it's lesser as a work of art, whereas aestheticism says no, the value is the individual’s realization of such as it crystalizes through their encounter with the work of art, and then that moment of experiencing a work of art is never normative. And that was something that literary criticism, as it was developing in the 1920s and 30s, couldn't abide. It needed norms. It needed normative value in order to construct its critical edifice. I think that's why aestheticism dropped out of fashion and it's not really been picked up enough. And placing aestheticism as a critical term at the centre of our critical conversations is a good way of countering a lot of the criticisms that writers we work on receive, but it facilitates more serious, mature conversations about the philosophy of art because I think decadence leads to maybe a lack of seriousness in critical endeavor, because you can sort of latch on to onto tropes or you can latch on to symbols. And you can talk about them without talking about the sort of value relations that all artworks always produce.
KH: That's right. The other reason why “decadence” has gained currency is that the term enables us to have transnational conversations in a way that aestheticism and “art for art's sake” do not. Aestheticism, of course, was a very English movement. And I think this is part of the insularity that Alex is talking about as well, whereas decadence is more clearly transnational. It enables us to have a good and useful way to think about cross-cultural influences, the migration of ideas and also to open out larger ethical discussions. In this way too, decadence speaks to the contemporary academia in a way that aestheticism doesn’t.
JD: What’s also interesting is that in Germany both Aesthetizismus and Dekadenz can be subsumed within a much more broadly understood Literatur der Moderne. I know it’s the same in other European countries. German colleagues often find the stricter temporal divisions that we have in the Anglophone literary world somewhat bemusing. When we think about it, it’s rather obvious that Charles Baudelaire and Christina Rossetti and Charles Olson can all be considered part of the same broad movement for a literature of modernity. That recognition seems easier to make in Anglophone academia thanks to Cusp, the new Johns Hopkins journal that you edit together with Kristin Mahoney. I wondered if you might take the time to sell your wares and advertise a little bit what was the impulse and idea behind Cusp and what things you like publishing in it, and what you would like to see more of.
KH: What was the impulse, Alex?
AM: I guess the first impulse was that English Literature in Transition was folding and that we thought that it was a good home for work that straddles these two periods. Victorian Studies has six or seven major journals and Modernist Studies has four or five. But if you don't see yourself as fitting neatly into either, then you need somewhere that allows you to write across those demarcations. So we wanted there to be a home for the sort of scholarship that we do. I think we also thought that English Literature in Transition didn't have the dynamism and the openness that we wanted from a journal. We wanted a journal that was transnational. We wanted a journal that that was interdisciplinary and multimedia. We also wanted a journal that didn't have hard and fast temporal endpoints and starting points. Those endpoints were in the title of ELT 1880-1920. We're happy to publish work that goes right up to the contemporary as long as it's of interest to our readers. We don't see there being some sort of endpoints to “the cusp.” “The cusp” starts everywhere and ends everywhere. So I think that's what we wanted to do: to make sure that there was a home for scholarship in our field. But to make sure it spoke to where the field was in the 2020s, which we saw as being quite different from where ELT was, which had been set up in in a very different academic age and maybe didn’t reflect the age in which we were living.
KH: Yes, I completely agree. We did everything we could to get someone else to do it too: we didn't want to edit a journal — and I mean that in the nicest possible way. We heard that the ELT was closing. Alex and Kristin and I began messaging each other the night that Kristin and I had been told by Regina Gagnier that the journal was closing. We thought hard about the relationship between a journal and the intellectual field it serves — and one's own responsibility as an academic within that. Who, we asked, will take responsibility for doing this thing — running a forum for new scholarship — that we felt needed to exist? At a time when it feels like a lot of what we do as academics in literary studies is potentially under threat, is it a good idea to begin this kind of venture? We were even thinking “is the age over for period-based journals?” We felt, on reflection, that it was a good idea to try to do something so we first tried to take up ELT. And then we ended up with what I think was much better solution — although more work: the editor of ELT would not allow anyone to take the journal over, so we founded a new journal. I think that gave us a new start, but also means that we had to build the journal up. The question of what a journal can be or should be, as Alex said, in the 2020s is very different from what a journal was in the 1970s, when ELT was founded. More broadly in literary studies, journal publication hasn't come to terms with the new century at all including how we read new forms. We have to. Academics are not submitting long form essays to journals in volumes that they were ten years ago or even five years ago. So journals have an opportunity to be dynamic spaces. We are thinking about that and have plans to include more innovative forms: at present we have a Notes and Reviews section where we're encouraging short form essays, sort of Notes and Queries-style lively pieces. We want to see the kind of work that we would like to read.
AM: The second part of your question, James, was about sort of what we've been happy to publish and what we maybe would like to publish.
JD: Yeah. So if anyone who's reading this interview, thinking about submitting to Cusp, what sort of thing would you like them to send you?
AM: Anything! No, I think what we'd like to see is diversity and variety in all its shapes and in all its forms. So historical, geographic, disciplinary variety. We want to see things that are interesting to us. I guess what we don't want to see is — well, I was going to say we don't want to see traditional literary criticism. That's not true. But I think what we'd like to see is literary criticism that is doing different or interesting things. And Cusp is a place for traditional literary criticism as well, of course. But I think we want a sense of things that are that are pushing boundaries, but also written in a way that is dynamic.
I think I can safely say what we want is criticism that is really clear and really engaging and isn't bogged down in the minutiae of critical arguments. There's plenty of spaces for people who want to do heavy-duty theory-driven criticism, and I just don't know how much that's of interest to our field. And I think it's one of the interesting things about our field in general is that scholars tend not to be overly invested in the elaborate theoretical framework. Cusp scholars tend to be much more interested in recovering lost historical works and in trying to reconstruct historical contexts, so I guess that's the sort of criticism that most of us I think like to read and most of us write. I think there's certainly a place for the elaborate conceptual framework. I think though it is interesting that our field hasn't been as maybe as theory-driven as other as other fields in literary studies. Do you see the same sort of thing, Kate, that we sort of don't tend to be that theory-ish?
KH: No, we're not. I don't think it makes sense for us to be driven by those large theoretical edifices. Our field is really defined by personalities, by archives, though this might seem to some old-fashioned criticism. I think that in Cusp we try to model a kind of historically-based criticism: a new new historicism. What we want to see is clear and lively criticism and this is closely related to our approach. I don't think there should be any place for boringly-written or obscure, or badly-constructed prose. There's no excuse for it, especially not in an interdisciplinary journal. There never has been, but today students are picking up essays from Project Muse, where they're not field specialists, and we want for them to be able to read our work. An essay has a duty to be clearly expressed, to actually engage a reader, and the intellectual snobbery about that which often comes together with 1980s style critical theory is no longer defensible. So I want to see good writing in Cusp always, and a sense, not overtly stated, but always implicit, of why this matters.
JD: I think that's something that's lovely about writing about our period, and teaching it. When I’m asked for contemporary examples of aesthetic criticism or of writing that embodies the stylistic ideals of decadence, I can point students and colleagues to most people working in our field. It’s not that people who work on Pater imitate him — often they’re very different stylistically or ideologically — but they share a critical temperament and a commitment to artful writing.
KH: I think there’s some work to be done in theorizing that kind of aestheticist history, and historically-based criticism. It's not old fashioned and has evolved very significantly since the new-historicism movement. There's an interesting presentism in much literary criticism on the long turn of the century, currently. Personally, I'm sceptical about presentism, but it should be defined as an approach and held up for discussion and critique.
When it comes to writing, I slightly despair that some of the best and most thought-provoking literary criticism I read is in the London Review of Books or the New York Review of Books and not in academic journals. There are loads and loads of academics who are able to write wide-ranging, clear and engaging work based on original research, and they're not necessarily encouraged to publish that work in paywalled academic journals.
JD: I’ve got two further questions. The first is a nice one: in your field, what are your favorite works, primary or critical?
AM Favorite critical text is an easy one. It's Linda Dowling's Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle. It's an amazing book. It manages to be conceptually rich and sophisticated, but written with clarity and grace. She also managed to read everything before the age of digitization. I mean, how did she do that much reading?
JD: It's a lovely book.
AM: I guess well, one just had to read a lot. So I think I admire it as a book, which is both all of its time, it's sort of the 1980s and you can sort of feel a lot of that 1980s energy. But it's also for me still important and still hasn't been improved upon as a great work of literary criticism. It's certainly still valuable, and I use it all the time, and I give it to my students to use all the time.
Do I have a favorite literary work? I don't know. Do I actually like that much decadence and aestheticism? I don’t know.
KH: No, I don't think so.
AM: I would always choose to read good writing of the early 20th century because my favorite mode is the novel or criticism, and I think the novel and criticism were at their height in the first half of the 20th century. So if I could pick up a work of fiction to read over and over again, it would probably be, it would probably be any novel by Evelyn Waugh, but possibly the Sword of Honour trilogy. The work of criticism: You know, I can't go past The Sacred Wood as a kind of great work of literature. So, I mean, I just…I don't know if I actually enjoy reading decadence and aestheticism. I find them really interesting, and I find that I find the time period really interesting. But if someone said to me that I had to spend the rest of my life reading nothing but Michael Field’s verse dramas I probably would lose the will to live.
KH: That's not surprising, though.
JD: Although Attila, My Attila is quite good! I like Attila, My Attila!
AM: But what do you mean by good? It's not a desert island book, is it?
JD: Well, no.
KH: I love biographies and I could probably read and reread Richard Ellmann's biographies of Wilde and Joyce forever and be perfectly happy, perfectly contented. It’s because I get captivated by the lives that I like writing on the fin de siècle — it's a period that's defined by these great, terribly flawed personalities.
Probably my choice of primary text would be would be Henry James's Collected Letters, which I never tire of reading, in large part because he's such a bitch. He's just so wonderfully himself in the letters. I think of James as being so imperious, so difficult and standoffish, and then when he writes letters he loves a good gossip. I also wonder always that people in the nineteenth century spent so much time writing letters. I'm just amazed by how much they wrote. Well, as Alex said about Linda Dowling reading so much; how much they wrote! How on earth did James have time to write any fiction? It seems that he spent his whole life writing letters to people.
JD: All right. Thank you. A final question then, which most readers of this particular journal will have: what is the Americanist angle for aestheticism and decadence? I know your recent book shows that it is relevant in surprising ways, Kate, but the fin de siècle is not a historical period of study that is necessarily rich in American literature.
KH: As a movement?
JD: As a period, let's say.
KH: Well, yes, good question. So decadence arrives in America after Europe is done with it. Alex can talk about Edgar Saltus. But I would say that in America, “decadence” encapsulates Pre-Raphaelitism, aestheticism, Arts and Crafts, and all kinds of other associated movements, all mashed in together to this kind of inter-decadence. Then what America does is it takes decadence and it energizes it. It kind of revivifies it. It makes it modern. It’s the kind of the decadence that moves at the pace of the modern city in America during the 1910s and 1920s, when the most exciting writers in decadent tradition are taking that figure of the Decadent and making him — because it's still usually him — anxious and urbane and in the middle of Chicago, New York, Boston, or Los Angeles. There in those American locations, decadence is not freighted down with the kind of religious fear and moral apparatus that you see in Britain and Europe in the late nineteenth century.
AM: I don't really have too much to add to what Kate said, except just to emphasize that sense that American decadence is responding to very, different cultural contexts. So, there is no sense of generalized decline and decay in America in the 1910s and 1920s. This is a period of huge optimism and so taking a series of literary troops and forms which emerge out of one context and moving them to another is always going to transform that literary tradition. I think it's related to what's happened in France in the 1860s and 1880s, and then in England in the 1880s and 1890s, but it's a very different beast. And I think you do get some sense, though, that writers in America sometimes want to inhabit a European sense of despair and decline, and I think that's certainly something that Fitzgerald is doing in Tender is the Night. He really wants that European tradition of ennui and decline and that characterizes the Lost Generation, that desire to inhabit a European cultural model, which they're aesthetically invested in, but socially and culturally, perhaps not. And so it produces lots of these strange moments of often wannabe pessimism. Carl van Vechten quite good on this. The wonderful character of Peter Whiffle, who's just going round trying everything on. He's trying on all the old suits of the old world to see which one fits. In the end none of them fits. But this sense that you're taking a culture that's European and trying to wear it in New York and it's not really working, but the actual game of dressing up decadently produces its own sort of theatre and interest. It's a very different sort of decadence and it carries right on in America as well right into the 1950s.
So I think that in America, this sense of individualism comes to the fore and decadence becomes just another vehicle for individual self-expression rather than something that might reflect a culture more broadly. It is this idea of trying to find a language and a form that can help you to express yourself. This is why it's so important to writers of the Harlem Renaissance, who were taking Wilde and Huysmans and using this aesthetic model as a way of trying to express themselves because they feel like the dominant culture of America is not for them. So I think there's lots of ways in which decadence is being experimented with in the 1920s and 30s in America, which creates an immensely different thing.
KH: Yes, I'd like to link back to a point we touched on earlier: decadence becomes a kind of a mode of resistance to dominant American culture. It provides a frame and style with which writers in the Harlem Renaissance, working class writers, also, female writers can resist American capitalism, and dream a different kind of American Dream.
