Whatever their literary stature, however, the writers of escapist stories and carnal literature, the apostles of “decadence” and philosophers of the flesh, the sodden romanticizers of love and revolution, the après-guerre existentialists and nihilists all roiled popular consciousness and called doctrinaire modes of thinking into question in ways their intellectual critics rarely succeeded in doing. They were spirited, iconoclastic, and influential to a degree the academic elites were loath to acknowledge. They might not have constituted the basis for a genuinely revolutionary transformation of
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