AMERICAN LITERATURE

1914-1945
劉涵英
G E N E R A L S O C I A L AT M O S P H E R E

Rural America: The United States was still in the main a nation
of farmers and small towns, with about two-thirds of its population
living in rural districts or towns of fewer than 25000 inhabitants.
Distrust of international politics: the 1924 Immigration Act
prohibited all Asian immigration and set quotas for other countries
on the basis of their existing U.S. immigrant populations, intending
thereby to control the ethnic makeup of the United States.
G E N E R A L S O C I A L AT M O S P H E R E

Red Scare: immediate postwar years when labor union

headquarters were raided and immigrant radicals deported by a
government fearful of the influence of the newly Communist
Soviet Union.
Women’s movement: 1920 Nineteenth Amendment to the
Constitution (pushed by women’s work as nurses and ambulance
drivers during the war women’s right to vote.
G E N E R A L S O C I A L AT M O S P H E R E

NAACP (The National Association for the Advancement of

Colored People) was founded in 1909.
African Americans, emancipated urban woman, and the restless
young faced off against rural and urban traditionalists over the
question of who, exactly, was truly “American.”
1929 the stock market crashed: The Great Depression
G E N E R A L S O C I A L AT M O S P H E R E

WWII unified the country politically; revitalized industry, which

devoted itself to goods needed for the war effort; and put people to
work, including women who went into the labor force in
unprecedented numbers.
 L I T E R A RY C O N F L I C T S I N T H E
I N T E RWA R P E R I O D

1. literary tradition: to some, a work registering its allegiance to

literary history seemed imitative and old-fashioned; to others, a
work failing to honor literary tradition was bad or incompetent
writing modernist works often allude to previous literature
ironically, or deliberately fracture traditional literary formulas.
 L I T E R A RY C O N F L I C T S I N T H E
I N T E RWA R P E R I O D

2. The place of popular culture in serious literature: some writers

regarded it as crucial for the future of literature that popular forms,
such as film and jazz, be embraced; to others, serious literature by
definition had to reject what they saw as the cynical
commercialism of popular culture.
 L I T E R A RY C O N F L I C T S I N T H E
I N T E RWA R P E R I O D

3. how far literature should engage itself in political and social
struggle: for some, a work that was political in aim counted as
propaganda, not art; others thought that apolitical literature was
evasive and irresponsible; some viewed the call to keep art out of
politics as covertly political, a conservative mandate to preserve
the status quo, even if it did not acknowledge itself as such.
 CULTURAL CHANGES

Exploration of sexual minorities (Freud’s theories, woman’s

movements, homosexuality, etc.)
Great Migration: as a direct result of the industrial needs of
WWI, opportunities opened for African Americans in the factories
of the North Harlem Renaissance
Marxism and the labor class
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

The phonograph record and the record player; the motion

picture; radio pop culture
Automobile and highway: cities grew, suburbs came into being,
small towns died, new towns arose, according to the placement of
highways, which rapidly supplanted the railroad in shaping the
patterns of twentieth-century American urban expansion.
SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

Science and worldview: scientists discovered that atom was not the smallest possible unit
of matter, that matter was not indestructible, that both time and space were relative to an
observer’s position, that some phenomenon were so small that attempts at measurement
would alter them, that some outcomes could be predicted only in terms of statistical
probability, that the universe might be infinite in size and yet infinitely expanding…
Poets like Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Wallace Stevens questioned the capacity of science
to provide accounts of subjective experience and moral issues and elevated the
metaphorical language of poetry over the supposed literal accuracy of scientific
description “two cultures”: science versus letters.
 MODERNISM

In most English language literary contexts, “modernism” is a

catchall term for any kind of literary production in the interwar
period that deals with the modern world. More narrowly, it refers to
work that represents the transformation of traditional society under
the pressures of modernity, and that breaks down traditional literary
forms in doing so. “high modernism” is in a sense antimodern: it
interprets modernity as an experience of loss. Eg. The Waste Land.
 MODERNISM

At the heart of the high modernist aesthetic lay the conviction that the previously
sustaining structures of human life, whether social, political, religious, or artistic,
had been destroyed or shown up as falsehoods or, at best, arbitrary and fragile
human constructions thus a key formal characteristic typical of high modernist
works, whether in painting, sculpture, or musical composition, is its construction out
of fragments. Modernist literature is often notable for what it omits: the
explanations, interpretations, connections, summaries, and distancing that provide
continuity, perspective, and security is earlier literatures. High modernist writing was
self-reflexive, concerned with its own nature as art.