Terryl C. Givens
- Published in print:
- 2007
- Published Online:
- September 2007
- ISBN:
- 9780195167115
- eISBN:
- 9780199785599
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195167115.003.0018
- Subject:
- Religion, Religion and Society
The first great Mormon literature came only with the “Lost Generation” of the 40s, with authors like Maurine Whipple and Virginia Sorensen. The novel has flourished (with Levi Peterson a major ...
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The first great Mormon literature came only with the “Lost Generation” of the 40s, with authors like Maurine Whipple and Virginia Sorensen. The novel has flourished (with Levi Peterson a major figure), as has the short story (Douglas Thayer and Donald Marshall leading the way) poetry, and even science fiction (Orson Scott Card).Less
The first great Mormon literature came only with the “Lost Generation” of the 40s, with authors like Maurine Whipple and Virginia Sorensen. The novel has flourished (with Levi Peterson a major figure), as has the short story (Douglas Thayer and Donald Marshall leading the way) poetry, and even science fiction (Orson Scott Card).
Elaine Showalter
- Published in print:
- 1991
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198123835
- eISBN:
- 9780191671616
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198123835.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, Women's Literature, American, 20th Century Literature
This chapter examines some of the effects of post-war literary history on American women writers. The post-war literary movement is called the Lost Generation and it was in fact a community of men. ...
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This chapter examines some of the effects of post-war literary history on American women writers. The post-war literary movement is called the Lost Generation and it was in fact a community of men. While the ‘lost generation’ of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald became literary legend, another generation of American women writers suffered a period of conflict, repression, and decline. American women poets of the period seeking to reconcile femininity and creativity were the celebration of the miniature and the decorative, in exquisitely crafted sonnets and lyrics. The influences of political involvement for women writing during the 1930s are demonstrated. In spite of all the difficulties and defeats, American women writers in the 1920s and 1930s developed an important body of work that has finally become influential, as it is incorporated into a three-dimensional understanding of American literary history. For many of the leading women writers, black and white, of the 1980s, Their Eyes Were Watching God has become one of the most important books in a literary tradition that continues to inspire them and to enable their work.Less
This chapter examines some of the effects of post-war literary history on American women writers. The post-war literary movement is called the Lost Generation and it was in fact a community of men. While the ‘lost generation’ of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald became literary legend, another generation of American women writers suffered a period of conflict, repression, and decline. American women poets of the period seeking to reconcile femininity and creativity were the celebration of the miniature and the decorative, in exquisitely crafted sonnets and lyrics. The influences of political involvement for women writing during the 1930s are demonstrated. In spite of all the difficulties and defeats, American women writers in the 1920s and 1930s developed an important body of work that has finally become influential, as it is incorporated into a three-dimensional understanding of American literary history. For many of the leading women writers, black and white, of the 1980s, Their Eyes Were Watching God has become one of the most important books in a literary tradition that continues to inspire them and to enable their work.
David Roessel
- Published in print:
- 2001
- Published Online:
- January 2008
- ISBN:
- 9780195143867
- eISBN:
- 9780199871872
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195143867.003.0010
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century Literature and Romanticism
This chapter discusses the difficulty writers faced in writing about Greece at the start of the 1920s. It argues that a new conception of Greece, one not based on classical or Romantic texts, ...
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This chapter discusses the difficulty writers faced in writing about Greece at the start of the 1920s. It argues that a new conception of Greece, one not based on classical or Romantic texts, required some contact with the country and its people. However, for Americans, Greece was the lost country for both the Lost Generation and the generation after that. Greece had only slightly more literary travelers from Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. By the end of the 1930s, a new modern Greece had still not emerged in English writing. From 1929 to 1934, authors experimented with tragic Greece, the Byzantine legacy, and Cavafian Athens, and these ideas have all to some degree been subsumed into what we now think of as “Greece”. But none of them gained a wide following, especially in the years that followed. The drought in writing about Greece from 1935 to 19389 was just as bad as the one that had lasted from 1924 to 1929.Less
This chapter discusses the difficulty writers faced in writing about Greece at the start of the 1920s. It argues that a new conception of Greece, one not based on classical or Romantic texts, required some contact with the country and its people. However, for Americans, Greece was the lost country for both the Lost Generation and the generation after that. Greece had only slightly more literary travelers from Britain in the 1920s and 1930s. By the end of the 1930s, a new modern Greece had still not emerged in English writing. From 1929 to 1934, authors experimented with tragic Greece, the Byzantine legacy, and Cavafian Athens, and these ideas have all to some degree been subsumed into what we now think of as “Greece”. But none of them gained a wide following, especially in the years that followed. The drought in writing about Greece from 1935 to 19389 was just as bad as the one that had lasted from 1924 to 1929.
Kathleen Riley
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- April 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780198852971
- eISBN:
- 9780191887390
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198852971.003.0014
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This chapter explores the question, posed by Svetlana Boym in The Future of Nostalgia, ‘How can one be homesick for a home that one never had?’ Its focus is Woody Allen’s 2011 film Midnight in Paris, ...
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This chapter explores the question, posed by Svetlana Boym in The Future of Nostalgia, ‘How can one be homesick for a home that one never had?’ Its focus is Woody Allen’s 2011 film Midnight in Paris, the director’s most overt and sustained meditation on nostalgia, and the most wooing. The film concerns a twenty-first-century Hollywood screenwriter, Gil Pender, who stumbles effortlessly through the space-time continuum to find himself (in both senses) among Gertrude Stein’s Lost Generation, a world he has always believed to be his spiritual home. Through Gil’s time-travelling odyssey, Allen probes the allure and the perils of nostalgia; he shows how nostalgia relies on impossibility or absence to feed it, to lend it piquancy and artistic efficacy. The chapter also examines the Lost Generation’s propulsive nostalgia which was spawned by a tremendous sense of rootlessness and flux, and why the Odyssey was a guiding text for expatriates like Joyce, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald.Less
This chapter explores the question, posed by Svetlana Boym in The Future of Nostalgia, ‘How can one be homesick for a home that one never had?’ Its focus is Woody Allen’s 2011 film Midnight in Paris, the director’s most overt and sustained meditation on nostalgia, and the most wooing. The film concerns a twenty-first-century Hollywood screenwriter, Gil Pender, who stumbles effortlessly through the space-time continuum to find himself (in both senses) among Gertrude Stein’s Lost Generation, a world he has always believed to be his spiritual home. Through Gil’s time-travelling odyssey, Allen probes the allure and the perils of nostalgia; he shows how nostalgia relies on impossibility or absence to feed it, to lend it piquancy and artistic efficacy. The chapter also examines the Lost Generation’s propulsive nostalgia which was spawned by a tremendous sense of rootlessness and flux, and why the Odyssey was a guiding text for expatriates like Joyce, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald.
Kathleen Riley
- Published in print:
- 2021
- Published Online:
- April 2021
- ISBN:
- 9780198852971
- eISBN:
- 9780191887390
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198852971.003.0003
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This chapter looks at Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front, which focuses on a generational subset for whom the past barely exists in memory and the future is inconceivable—a ...
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This chapter looks at Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front, which focuses on a generational subset for whom the past barely exists in memory and the future is inconceivable—a predicament in which war itself becomes a kind of Ithaca, the only home to which the adolescent soldier has any intimate or tangible connection. Narrator Paul Bäumer and his schoolfellows inhabit a No Man’s Land of their own: they are young but have lost hope; they feel old but have no yesteryear; they are refugees whose yearning is without shape or object. Whatever images of home they had when they enlisted, whatever plans for the future, were too nebulous, too lacking in resilience to compete with war’s intensity, its ubiquity and noise. The chapter shows that, despite its apparent pessimism, All Quiet was envisaged as a first step towards finding the ‘way back’ and pointing out ‘the road onward’, and that writing the book was itself a form of nostos.Less
This chapter looks at Erich Maria Remarque’s novel All Quiet on the Western Front, which focuses on a generational subset for whom the past barely exists in memory and the future is inconceivable—a predicament in which war itself becomes a kind of Ithaca, the only home to which the adolescent soldier has any intimate or tangible connection. Narrator Paul Bäumer and his schoolfellows inhabit a No Man’s Land of their own: they are young but have lost hope; they feel old but have no yesteryear; they are refugees whose yearning is without shape or object. Whatever images of home they had when they enlisted, whatever plans for the future, were too nebulous, too lacking in resilience to compete with war’s intensity, its ubiquity and noise. The chapter shows that, despite its apparent pessimism, All Quiet was envisaged as a first step towards finding the ‘way back’ and pointing out ‘the road onward’, and that writing the book was itself a form of nostos.
