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This chapter discusses the concepts of “Americanization” and the humanities. It first shows that the “Americanization” of the humanities is not an effect of cultural imperialism, but of a promise of new possibilities of self-fashioning and self-empowerment. The chapter states that while the volume of scholarship is steadily increasing, that of available knowledge is slowly decreasing. The next section examines the development of the humanities after World War II, and introduces the concepts of humanistic knowledge, meaning production, and the current theory boom in the humanities. Expressive individualism is the topic of the following section, and it is described as a successful end-product of a central project in the humanities. John Guillory's analysis of the humanities, the crisis of the humanities, and cultural modernity are also discussed.

The book leads to two main conclusive points. Firstly, representations of cultural modernity in Latin America were not simply based on the idea of progress but were also linked with notions of degeneration. These ideas were subsequently challenged in order to engender a process of regeneration through which a different and more humane modern society could emerge, arising phoenix-like from the ashes of europeísta decline. The concluding chapter stresses the long-term significance of these turn-of-the-century debates by briefly considering the enthusiastic reception in South America of Oswald Spengler’s book on The Decline of the West (1918). Secondly, the book shows the ways in which and the extent to which the cultural notion of Latinity was debated, adapted and often challenged from within and the extent to which it facilitated internal discourses of modernity as well as of regional identity. The regeneration of Latin America needed to be primarily cultural. Or, to put it differently, culture was the essential instrument for political change. This political ideal would have a long-standing resonance in Spanish American criticism, reaching its ideological climax in 1920s Mexico with José Vasconcelos’ aesthetic vision of the cosmic race.

Chapter 3 examines the aerialized farmscapes of regionalist artist Grant Wood and the fissure between the old and new iconographies of Midwestern culture that erupted in the 1930s. Wood’s sense of aeriality veered from the bucolic to the vertiginous as his landscapes morphed, over the course of the decade, from mythic agrarian scenes to somewhat otherworldly, yet also strikingly modern, spaces. The chapter interrogates Wood’s adoption and consequent adaptation of a Midwestern aerial sensibility as a means of negotiating the changes that technological and cultural modernity were delivering upon the region. Beginning by identifying Wood’s use of a nineteenth-century bird’s-eye iconography as a means to reinsert traditional form and value into the contemporary regional scene, the chapter extends into a consideration of the growing dynamism and increasingly ambivalent modernity of Wood’s later painting. For Wood, the experience of modern aeriality served not only as a tool of modern agrarian recodification, but also as a source for hybrid integration of old and new modes for envisioning the look and idea of the Midwest.

Chapter 1 offers important historical and conceptual contexts for the late nineteenth century. The chapter suggests that ‘aestheticist lyric poetry’ might be usefully conceptualised ‘through the twin impetuses of conceptual expansion and formal reduction’. It then goes on to outline the context of ‘cultural modernity’, to which it is suggested aestheticist lyric poetry is responding, in order to define further the ‘crisis’ in lyric. It also introduces the three conceptual frames that set the remit for the three parts of the book; these are three key axes around which lyric poetry operates: time, space and subjectivity. Chapter 1 ends with a preliminary case study from the work of ‘Michael Field’ (the assumed name of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper) to demonstrate in practice the relevance of the three frames to aestheticist poetry.

This chapter examines the delayed but still strong and lasting impression that Pearl White left on Czechoslovakia's critics, viewers, and avant-garde movement. Drawing on a series of articles in Czech periodicals from the late 1910s to the 1930s, it considers the issues presented by White and the American serial films regarding the international market, the need to come to terms with Hollywood's global reach, and the impact of glocalized Americana for local production. The chapter first looks at the sudden influx of American films in Czechoslovakia after World War I before discussing how America was perceived as a model of democracy and cultural modernity in the early years of the First Czechoslovak Republic. It then explores how White fueled the fantasies of the Czech populace as well as the ways that she was appropriated and re-imagined in the service of various discourses that spoke for the mental and physical well-being of the nation. It also analyzes White's Czech career within the context of larger issues related to spectatorship, film aesthetics, and the creation of star mythology.

This critical summary conclusively expands the careers of modernity, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism outside of Western geographies and their conventional disciplinary leanings. Maharaja Sayajirao’s collecting practice and institutional patronage together become an interstice that connects the cultural, political, and economic aspirations of princely Baroda, colonial India, and Euro-America. Contextual readings of Baroda’s projects display a pan-Indian and global reference frame in the assemblage of ideas, materials, practitioners, aesthetic and technological inputs, many of which are drawn from incompatible domains of the East and the West, modernization, capital and tradition, colonial and national, art and craft, and the private and public realms. Over time, this interstitial zone is shaped variously by derivation, hybridization, and re-articulation of diverse inputs that simultaneously respond to local, modern, and global standards. Thus, different standards collapse across oblique domains and come together in new, compatible, and cosmopolitan relationships. Together they represent a site of cultural nationalism; a global, modern art; and a provenance of contemporary relevance.

This chapter describes the physical setting of prewar Wuhan and its political role in the history of the Chinese Republic. The metropolis now called Wuhan dominated the economic and political life of the central Yangzi River region for well over a millennium. Twentieth-century Wuhan's economic center was the bustling port of Hankou, whose pursuit of Western-style commercial and cultural modernity rose to a new level after it became a railroad terminus early in the century. Another distinguishing feature of Wuhan's modern history was the recurrent physical destruction and rebuilding that its inhabitants came to expect.

This chapter argues that Theodor W. Adorno's philosophy about despair has been poorly understood by his critics, one of them being Jürgen Habermas. He argued that Adorno betrayed the “rational content of cultural modernity” to an unyielding logic of domination, resulting in a critique of Enlightenment without “any dynamism upon which critique could base its hope.” For Habermas, despair should be considered as the philosophical problem that originated in a bad philosophy (which starts with Nietzsche) that was resolved with good philosophy (which starts with Kant). However, in expressing this notion, Habermas treated critical philosophy as a rescue operation. This treatment may cause the objective history of despair to fall into obscurity, and may compel the passions to give way to the primacy of communicative reason.

This chapter concludes the book by discussing how the Awakening movement may be conceptualized in five ways. The Awakening was orthodox. It was a response against certain doctrinal and theological developments that had appeared within the Protestant churches during the religious Enlightenment. The Awakening was pietistic. It sought to reform the Protestant churches of Germany through the spiritual revival of their constituent members. The Awakening was ecumenical. Lutherans and the German Reformed worked together with like-minded Catholics, who shared their conviction that the basic Christian message had become corrupted, forgotten, or ignored in many places in Germany. The Awakening was international. Awakened Protestants in Germany and evangelicals in Britain exercised influence upon each other through the exchange of models for new religious initiatives and works of academic theology. The Awakening was modern. The Enlightenment brought new civic freedoms to Germany, which enabled awakened Protestants to pursue their religious goals.