Modernist Commitments and American National Cultural Identity in the Interwar Period

Abstract

In the teens and early twenties, various notions of American cultural identity emerged, testifying to the creativity of the American intelligentsia in criticizing and overcoming the genteel tradition, as well as responding to the inferiority complex that many American intellectuals felt towards Europe. Among these responses, localist Modernism, and in particular William Carlos Williams’s Modernism shaped one of the most progressive conceptions of American national cultural identity that developed in the interwar period. In the late twenties and early thirties, the debate over American national cultural identity took a new direction as the European avant-gardes declined and indigenous Modernism strengthened with the rise of a new political avant-garde. A new step was reached when under Roosevelt, the state actively contributed to the definition of the cultural identity of the nation, to an extent and along lines that had never been imagined before.