Early Twentieth Century
Cultural pessimism of the Oswald Spengler epoch might be seen as a refusal, of the rather intellectual and secular choice between nihilism and modernism. Politically this tended to squeeze liberal thought.
Specific criticism of the West, in the first years of the twentieth century, is usually taken as of the Old World of Europe, excluding therefore North America in particular. The classic source for this is Spengler's The Decline of the West (1918–1923), often cited in the years following its publication. The tone of much of the critical writing, for example, of T. S. Eliot, and the historical writing of Arnold J. Toynbee from the 1920s onwards, is identifiable. It was fashionable to say that Spengler had at least formulated some truths about the cultural situation of Europe after World War I. Eliot's major early work The Waste Land (1922) was commonly and directly interpreted in those terms.
Read more about this topic: Cultural Pessimism
Famous quotes containing the words twentieth century, early, twentieth and/or century:
“Hastiness and superficiality are the psychic diseases of the twentieth century, and more than anywhere else this disease is reflected in the press.”
—Alexander Solzhenitsyn (b. 1918)
“There is a relationship between cartooning and people like Miró and Picasso which may not be understood by the cartoonist, but it definitely is related even in the early Disney.”
—Roy Lichtenstein (b. 1923)
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“There was never a century nor a country that was short of experts who knew the Deity’s mind and were willing to reveal it.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)