In the last two decades of the nineteenth century, Americans were faced
with the challenges and uncertainties of a new era. The comfortable
Victorian values of continuity, progress, and order clashed with the
unsettling modern notions of constant change, relative truth, and chaos.
Attempting to embrace the intellectual challenges of modernism, American
thinkers of the day were yet reluctant to welcome the wholesale
rejection of the past and destruction of traditional values. In
Reluctant Modernism: American Thought and Culture, 1880-1900, George
Cotkin surveys the intellectual life of this crucial transitional
period. His story begins with the Darwinian controversies, since the
mainstream of American culture was just beginning to come to grips with
the implications of the Origins of Species, published in 1859. Cotkin
demonstrates the effects of this shift in thinking on philosophy,
anthropology, and the newly developing field of psychology. Drawing on
his extensive knowledge of these fields, he explains clearly and
concisely the essential tenets of such major thinkers and writers as
William James, Franz Boas, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Henry Adams, and
Kate Chopin. Throughout this fascinating, readable history of the
American fin de siècle run the contrasting themes of continuity and
change, faith and rationalism, despair over the meaninglessness of life
and, ultimately, a guarded optimism about the future.