La Generación Perdida

TEMA 55. LA GENERACIÓN PERDIDA: S. FITZGERALD, J. STEINBECK Y E. HEMINGWAY. LA NARRATIVA DE FAULKNER.

1. THE LOST GENERATION: AN INTRODUCTION

2. F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

3. JOHN STEINBECK

4. ERNEST HEMINGWAY

5. WILLIAM FAULKNER: REGIONALISM AND RURAL NATURALISM

5.1. Life and work

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

- Literature: 1914 to 1990. The United States InformationAgency. 1996.
- Heivey, D. & Downs, L.H., Recent American Literature. Vols. 3 and 4.
- Cunliffe, M., American Literature since 1900. London: Penguin, 1993.
- Sampson, G., The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature. 3rd ed. London: CUP, 1970.

1. THE LOST GENERATION: AN INTRODUCTION

The authors studied here are American narrators of the Lost Generation - called in this way becauseit flourished between, or was affected by, the two World Wars. The concept of Lost Generation was coined by Gertrude Stein to refer to a group of artists who shared a certain number of characteristics:

* Men who had served in the WWI and felt disgusted by the narrow-mindedness of American society.
* Loss of faith and hope in themselves and in institutions.
* They were against bothAmerican traditional values and current policy of materialism and extravagance.
* Men who, after the WWI, searched escape from their intellectual despair in the Europe of the 20s.

So Lost Generation stood up for a group of writers who were against American ideals and needed to find inspiration out of the boundaries of their homeland. All these authors were born around 1895 and their mostsignificant literary production falls within the period of the literary Modernism (1900-1945), characterized by formal and thematic experimentation.

This is a brilliant period in American letters, more so in the novel than in poetry, and in poetry than in drama. The only outstanding dramatist of the period is Eugene O'Neill. As for poetry, the naturalistic school is represented by Edwin ArlingtonRobinson and Robert Frost, while T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens are outstanding representatives of the experimental and intellectual tendencies typical of the age. In the narrative genre, the historical American delay with respect to Europe is maintained : the American naturalistic novel, which had begun only with Crane about 1890, goes on with London, Norris and Dreiser during thefirst years of our century, becomes richer and more varied in the 20's with Dos Passos, Sinclair Lewis, Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway and others, and extends to the 30's with the work of several of the authors that have been mentioned and above all with Steinbeck, the novelist of the rural worker par excellence.
Naturally, we are talking about a sui generis naturalism, more sophisticated and variedthan the classical regionalism/realism/naturalism line of the preceding century.

Other contemporary authors - a minority in fact - such as Thorton Wilder or Sherwood Anderson follow the line of what was commoner in Europe: formal experimentation, psychological and psychic analysis, the "inner adventure" of the self.

William Faulkner, whose long career started in the late twenties and endedup in the early fifties, is the best American narrator of his times and one of the great figures of the world literature. As with all great authors, Faulkner is difficult to classify. Many qualities, that combine the naturalistic and the experimental tendencies, are found in his works: formal experimentation, multiple point of view technique, non-chronological organization, shocking and scandaloussubject matter, psychological conflict, complex plots, naturalism/realism/regionalism of the traditional kind.

2. F. SCOTT FITZGERALD (1896-1940)

American short-story writer and novelist famous for his depictions of the Jazz Age (the 1920s), his most brilliant novel being The Great Gatsby (1925). His private life, with his wife, Zelda, in both America and France, became almost as...