The Modernist Period of American Literature (1910-1945) _2

СОДЕРЖАНИЕ

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INTRODUCTION

Like other national literatures, American literature was shaped by the history of the country that produced it. For almost a century and a half, America was merely a group of colonies scattered along the eastern seaboard of the North American continent ̶colonies from which a few hardy souls tentatively ventured westward. After a successful rebellion against the motherland, America became the United States, a nation.

By the end of the 19th century this nation extended southward to the Gulf of Mexico, northward to the 49th parallel, and westward to the Pacific. By the end of the 19th century, too, it had taken its place among the powers of the world ̶ its fortunes so interrelated with those of other nations that inevitably it became involved in two world wars and, following these conflicts, with the problems of Europe and East Asia.

Meanwhile, the rise of science and industry, as well as changes in ways of thinking and feeling, wrought many modifications in people's lives. All these factors in the development of the United States molded the literature of the country.

America entered the twentieth century optimistically as a wealthy, strong world power. Although this time period started off with prosperity, it soon became one characterized by two world wars and a severe economic depression. These events ushered in a new age in American literature, Modernism, as writers began to attempt to express modern life with their writings.

The Modernist era was an era of boldness and fast-paced living. The culture saw the Harlem Renaissance and the Roaring Twenties (also known as the Jazz Age). This was a time of flourishing art and extravagant living that acted as a prequel to the Great Depression. In literature, the era was characterized by a break away from traditional styles of poetry and other types of writing. Ezra Pound began the Imagist movement. This poetry abandoned all traditional form and sought to portray a single image in time. It was during this time that authors began to

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experiment with different styles of writing and earned American international acclaim.

Although their works were very different, Modern authors shared a common purpose, which was to capture the essence of modern life. This purpose is why most modernist literature was written in a pessimistic way. Most modern works reflected the thoughts and confusion of most Americans, especially during the Great Depression and the two World Wars. The chaotic literature revealed the instability of the American people's mindset as they attempted to understand what was going on around them. There was also a loss of faith and hope in the American people during this time period and a collapse of morality and values. Furthermore, this loss of values led to a confused sense of identity and place in the world, as is iterated in T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock."

The literature of the era was often times fragmented to cause confusion and intentionally break the flow of words in literature. Two major themes of the era were confusion and disillusionment. These themes and this literary movement as a whole reflected the new mindset of the American people after the turn of the century. It was because of this mindset and the loss of hope in the American dream, that the major authors of the time period such as Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Eliot, and Pound became known as the Lost Generation.

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1. The contexts for the literature of this period

These contexts may include the historical, political, cultural, and intellectual. The historical and political contexts for the period include: the Great War, the Russian Bolshevik Revolution, the execution of the Russian Tsar (1918), the establishment of the Irish Free State (1922), Mussolini’s March on Rome (1922), the establishment of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (1923), Hitler’s

Munich Putsch (1923), the General Strike in Britain (1926), the collapse of the American stock exchange (1929), Hitler’s chancellorship of Germany and the burning of the Reichstag (1933), the British abdication crisis (1936), the Spanish Civil War (1936), and the Second World War, culminating in the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki (1945). The cultural and intellectual contexts for the period’s explosion of modern literature and modern art include: the development and accessibility of transport, and huge increases in its speed; the emergence of visible and invisible communications such as photography, the cinema, the telephone, telegraphy and the wireless, Preface xiii which resulted in the rapid transmission of news, ideas, and images on a scale previously unknown; the discoveries of X-rays and radium; the artificial generation of electricity and its use in everyday life; and not least, discoveries and hypotheses about the structure of matter, space, and time, and about the processes of perception, and the understanding of the self.

2. Writing from 1914 to 1945

Important movements in drama, poetry, fiction, and criticism took form in the years before, during, and after World War I. The eventful period that followed the war left its imprint upon books of all kinds. Literary forms of the period were extraordinarily varied, and in drama, poetry, and fiction leading authors tended toward radical technical experiments.

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Experiments in drama. Although drama had not been a major art form in the 19th century, no type of writing was more experimental than a new drama that arose in rebellion against the glib commercial stage.

In the early years of the 20th century, Americans traveling in Europe encountered a vital, flourishing theatre; returning home, some of them became active in founding the Little Theatre movement throughout the country. Freed from commercial limitations, playwrights experimented with dramatic forms and methods of production, and in time producers, actors, and dramatists appeared who had been trained in college classrooms and community playhouses. Some Little Theatre groups became commercial producers ̶ for example, the Washington Square Players, founded in 1915, which became the Theatre Guild (first production in 1919).

The resulting drama was marked by a spirit of innovation and by a new seriousness and maturity. Eugene O'Neill, the most admired dramatist of the period, was a product of this movement. He worked with the Provincetown Players before his plays were commercially produced. His dramas were remarkable for their range. Beyond the Horizon (first performed 1920), Anna Christie (1921), Desire Under the Elms (1924), and The Iceman Cometh (1946) were naturalistic works, while The Emperor Jones (1920) and The Hairy Ape (1922) made use of the Expressionistic techniques developed in German drama in the period 1914-24. He also employed a stream-of-consciousness form in Strange Interlude (1928) and produced a work that combined myth, family drama, and psychological analysis in Mourning Becomes Electra (1931).No other dramatist was as generally praised as O'Neill, but many others wrote plays that reflected the growth of a serious and varied drama, including Maxwell Anderson, whose verse dramas have dated badly, and Robert E. Sherwood, a Broadway professional who wrote both comedy (Reunion in Vienna [1931]) and tragedy (There Shall Be No Night [1940]). Marc Connelly wrote touching fantasy in a Negro folk biblical play, The Green Pastures (1930). Like O'Neill, Elmer Rice made use of both Expressionistic techniques (The Adding Machine [1923]) and naturalism (Street Scene [1929]). Lillian Hellman

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down because she first wanted to finish college. Frost then decided to leave on a trip to Virginia, and when he returned, he proposed again. Elinor had graduated from college at that time and she accepted. They married on December 19, 1895,

and had their first child, Elliot, in 1896.

In 1897, Frost attended Harvard University. He soon had to drop out after two years due to health concerns. He returned to Lawrence to join his wife, who was now pregnant with their second child, Lesley. In 1900, Frost and his family moved to a farm in New Hampshire and attempted to make a life on it for the next 12 years. Though it was a productive time for Frost's writing, it was a difficult period in his personal life. Elinor gave birth to four more children. Two of his children suffered from mental illness, and two of them died. Despite these challenges, Frost became accustomed to rural life and began setting many poems in the countryside.

When Frost was 38, he found a publisher who would publish his first book of poems, A Boy’s Will, followed by North of Boston a year later. It was at this time that Frost met Ezra Pound and Edward Thomas. Pound and Thomas were the first to review his work in a favorable light, as well as provide Frost with encouragement and advice. Frost claimed that Thomas's long walks over the English landscape served as the inspiration for one of his most famous poems, "The Road Not Taken." The time Frost spent in England was one of the most significant periods in his life and in his work, but it was very short. WWI broke out in 1914, and as a result, Frost and Elinor returned to America early in 1915.

When Frost arrived back home, he was well-received by the publishing world. Frost famously sent the Monthly the same poems that they had rejected before his stay in England. In 1916, Frost and Elinor settled down once again on a farm New Hampshire. Frost then began his career as a teacher at several colleges. Frost received more than 40 honorary degrees during his lifetime. In 1924, he received

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complications related to surgery. His ashes are interred in a family plot in

Bennington, Vermont.

4. Literary Themes

The major literary themes of the Modernist Era are confusion, isolation, and disillusionment. These themes reflect the mindset of the American people and the feelings that plagued them throughout the early 1900s. T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is a good representation of the theme of confusion by not only being confusing to read because of its fragmentation, but also by showing a man (Prufrock) who is grappling with decision making and trying to figure out

what class of society he belongs in like many during this time period did.

The theme of isolation shows not only in everyday relationships but as the American people's take on world affairs. The U.S. desired to remain neutral through both World Wars, but eventually were forced into participation. “In Another Country,” by Ernest Hemingway portrays the isolation felt by soldiers and

common Americans.

The theme of disillusionment is arguably the most common theme of the Modernist era. There was a disillusionment in the American people that the first world war would be quick and painless. The Great Gatsby displays the theme of disillusionment in that he truly believes that he can recreate his past with Daisy.

Katherine Anne Porter’s story, “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” shows confusion and disillusionment that accompanies growing old and dying. Overall, this widespread disillusionment reflected the loss of values and faith that suddenly occurred in the American people at the turn of the century.

5. The faces of this literary period

A sense of disillusionment and loss pervades much American modernist fiction. That sense may be centered on specific individuals, or it may be directed

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toward American society or toward civilization generally. It may generate a nihilistic, destructive impulse, or it may express hope at the prospect of change.

5.1 Key Authors

F. Scott Fitzgerald skewered the American Dream in The Great Gatsby

(1925).

Richard Wright exposed and attacked American racism in Native Son

(1940).

Zora Neale Hurston told the story of a black woman’s three marriages in

Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).

Ernest Hemingway’s early novels The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) articulated the disillusionment of the Lost Generation.

Willa Cather told hopeful stories of the American frontier, set mostly on the

Great Plains, in O Pioneers! (1913) and My Ántonia (1918).

William Faulkner used stream-of-consciousness monologues and other formal techniques to break from past literary practice in The Sound and the Fury (1929).

John Steinbeck depicted the difficult lives of migrant workers in Of Mice and Men (1937) and The Grapes of Wrath (1939).

T.S. Eliot was an American by birth and, as of 1927, a British subject by choice. His fragmentary, multivoiced The Waste Land (1922) is the quintessential modernist poem, but his was not the dominant voice among American modernist poets.

Robert Frost and Carl Sandburg evocatively described the regions—New England and the Midwest, respectively—in which they lived.

The Harlem Renaissance produced a rich coterie of poets, among them Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Alice Dunbar Nelson.

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