Art and the adolescent impulse (opens in new tab)

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / There’s a plausible argument that American culture is in a state of arrested development, ever bending back to a kind of national adolescence born of a persistent self-image of fledgling prodigy. Leslie Fiedler made the case as to literature at mid-century with Love and Death in the American Novel, insisting on the sober maturity of European letters in light of imperial decline and epochal devastation against the exceptionalist puerility of American fiction...