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.
