The Conservative Aesthetic: Theodore Roosevelt, Popular Darwinism, and the American Literary West

(Hardback)

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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 Jeffersons 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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How did the aesthetics of a mythic Western ethos shape our past and modern understanding of conservatism Mexals eloquently written work answers this timely question. Breaking from histories of conservatism that locate its emergence after WWII, Mexal offers a fresh reading of conservatism as an aesthetic movement, one that was not only born in the political sphere, but in the cultural realms of literature and art. In doing so, he reads known and unknown literatures and histories in fresh and exciting ways, and, in the end, he gives us a study that will be foundational in Western American culture.

Author Bio

Stephen J. Mexal is professor of English at California State University, Fullerton.