American Literature during 1914-1945

American Literature during 1914-1945

Introduction

The wars America has fought have been a great source of inspiration and an important theme for the American literature especially for the major writers of those times. It is important to consider that what would American literature had been without literary works such as “The Eatonville Anthology” (1926), “the Naked and the Dead” (1948) and “Farewell to Arms” (1929) etc. the World war I and II had significant impacts of American literature, similarly, the literary dealings of those wars also influenced the existing concepts of war and its nature (Baym, et al. 2007).

Discussion

The United States was engaged in two wars between 1915 and 1945 and as a result it emerged as a powerful modern nation. The United States was involved in World War I for very short time period and also yearned for its isolation of previous years. On the other hand, it went into Great depression and social tensions which threatened the stability of the country for a decade until it got its status by being involved in World War II (Lundberg, 1984). The dominant literary aesthetics were a response to the pressure and contradictions of the contemporary lives of that time and is known as “modernism”. On one hand, the country struggled with the quick modernization, on the other hand, the authors and poets were struggling to put a mask on the traditional literature and also translating the American preoccupations and theme into an international style (Baym, et al. 2007).

The literary aesthetic of “High Modernism” can better be understood as a rivalry between serious and popular culture. It is due to the fact that modern literature represented the ways in which modernity was changing the traditional culture by testing, altering and adapting literary forms and styles. The modernists who had anti-modernists sentiments who believed that what had been lost could not keep them from disregarding the preceding literary styles to portray that loss. The modern prose and poetry tended to be precise, short, suggestive and subjective rather than deeply detailed with peripheral descriptions (Lundberg, 1984). It included the fragments rather than having coherent and cohesive patterns. It favored questions over pat explanations and tended to reject the artificial literary orders along with assuring the objective truth which could not be seen in real world. When works like “The Hollow Men” and “Journey of the Magi” included the overarching patterns, they ...