Literature
Lost Generation
The "Lost Generation" refers to a group of American writers who came of age during World War I and felt disillusioned by the societal changes that followed. This term was popularized by Ernest Hemingway and encapsulates the sense of aimlessness and disillusionment experienced by the generation. The literature produced by these writers often reflects themes of alienation, disillusionment, and a search for meaning.
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3 Key excerpts on "Lost Generation"
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eBook - ePub- Britannica Educational Publishing, Adam Augustyn(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Britannica Educational Publishing(Publisher)
The main characters of The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms, and For Whom the Bell Tolls are young men whose strength and self-confidence nevertheless coexist with a sensitivity that leaves them deeply scarred by their wartime experiences. War was for Hemingway a potent symbol of the world, which he viewed as complex, filled with moral ambiguities, and offering almost unavoidable pain, hurt, and destruction. To survive in such a world, and perhaps emerge victorious, one must conduct oneself with honour, courage, endurance, and dignity, a set of principles known as “the Hemingway code.” To behave well in the lonely, losing battle with life is to show “grace under pressure” and constitutes in itself a kind of victory, a theme clearly established in The Old Man and the Sea. Lost Generation In general the Lost Generation was the post–World War I generation, but specifically it was a group of U.S. writers who came of age during the war and established their literary reputations in the 1920s. The term stems from a remark made by Gertrude Stein to Ernest Hemingway, “You are all a Lost Generation.” Hemingway used it as an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises (1926), a novel that captures the attitudes of a hard-drinking, fast-living set of disillusioned young expatriates in postwar Paris. The generation was “lost” in the sense that its inherited values were no longer relevant in the postwar world and because of its spiritual alienation from a U.S. that, basking under Pres. Warren G. Harding’s “back to normalcy” policy, seemed to its members to be hopelessly provincial, materialistic, and emotionally barren. The term embraces Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings, Archibald MacLeish, Hart Crane, and many other writers who made Paris the centre of their literary activities in the ’20s. They were never a literary school. In the 1930s, as these writers turned in different directions, their works lost the distinctive stamp of the postwar period
eBook - ePub- Jacob Stratman(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Research & Education Association(Publisher)
Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) Fitzgerald is heralded as the writer of the Jazz Age, a term he coined in his short story collection Tales of the Jazz Age (1922) to describe and define the years between World War I and the Great Depression. This era was marked by an increase in youthful abandonment and characterized by flappers, gangsters, speakeasies, riotous parties, sexual infidelity, and racial and sexual tolerance. Given these factors, it is not surprising that the Jazz Age also marked a great conflict between the traditions of the American past and the nontraditional sensibilities of the youthful future. Fitzgerald’s stories and novels explore this tension between “old” and “new.” During the Roaring Twenties, Fitzgerald wrote many highly profitable stories for the Saturday Evening Post, as well as collections of stories such as Flappers and Philosophers (1920) and All the Sad Young Men (1926), and the semiautobiographical novel This Side of Paradise (1920), which begins to explore the youthful socialite’s plight in postwar America. In 1925, during an expanded time in Europe with other expatriates like Hemingway and Stein, Fitzgerald published his most celebrated novel, The Great Gatsby. The narrator of Gatsby is a young Minnesota man named Nick Carraway who has moved to Long Island, New York, to make it in business. There, he lives in the West Egg district that is commonly associated with “new money.” His neighbor is Jay Gatsby, who lives in a large mansion and is known for hosting lavish weekly parties. Nick also has connections with East Egg, the upper-class “old money” section of Long Island. His cousin Daisy Buchanan lives there with her husband Tom; they have a tense marriage due to Tom’s infidelities with Myrtle Wilson, who lives in a lower-class industrial section of the area. The plot intensifies when Nick is eventually invited to one of Gatsby’s parties
eBook - ePub- H. Stuart Hughes, Stanley Hoffman(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
1In Germany above all the post-war intellectual scene was almost unrecognizably different from what had come before. Prior to 1914, except in the more raffish atmosphere of Munich, those who were self-consciously refined and distinguished—the sober, dignified writers and professors from the cultivated classes—had maintained an almost unchallenged pre-eminence. With the war's end came a general collapse of standards. New fashions in art and literature such as expressionism and "decadence" gripped the attention of the public. And Berlin, which had once had a reputation for formality and stuffiness, replaced Paris as the capital of the more special forms of vice.Meantime unknown scholars such as Spengler and Keyserling found eager buyers for their suspect wares. These "half-educated" dilettantes—to use the characteristically German term of reproach—offered fervid, sweeping interpretations of the course of world history which made the conventional products of scholarship seem thin fare indeed. A bewildered German public seized on Spengler's self-confident pronouncements to explain the misfortunes that had unaccountably fallen on their country. These readers most frequently came from the political Right. But the mood on the Left was not significantly different. What struck observers about the Germany of the immediate post-war era was the fever of experiment in all political camps. At its best it betokened a promising vitality. But in its more sinister aspects it suggested an intellectual nihilism that a decade later was to become the predominant mood among the youth of the country.In this volcanic atmosphere, the social thinkers who a generation earlier had ranked as innovators felt themselves in danger of being totally engulfed. Despite their political inexperience, they sought for ways to stem the flood. We have seen how men like Weber and Troeltsch and Meinecke had come to accept the revolution of November 1918 as a dire necessity. A week after the revolution the Democratic party was organized by those elements in German public life who wanted to combine political democracy with the retention of middle-class values. From the start it had a strong intellectual tinge: this was its pride and its weakness. Meinecke and Troeltsch aided in its foundation, Weber briefly supported it, and the philosopher-statesman Walther Rathenau soon became its most prominent public figure. But the party lacked both cohesion and political capacity. Its stand wavered on the issues of burning public concern. It could never decisively make up its mind between free enterprise and a planned economy, nor between nationalist truculence and compliance with the demands of the Allies. Moreover, with the death of Friedrich Naumann in 1919 and the murder of Rathenau three years later, it lost its most forceful political leaders. In the end, the Democratic party proved incapable of survival. By the late 1920's it was in full dissolution.
