The Lost Generation & Roaring 20s
by Summer Seage & Taylor Torok
About
- Time period: 1920s
- Where: United States
- In Europe, known as Golden Twenties
- Other movements:
-Dadism: Based in Paris from 1916-1922
--began in response to World War I
--produced nihilistic and anti logical prose, poetry, and art, and rejected the traditions, rules, and ideals of prewar Europe
-Surrealism: Based primarily in France from 1920s-1930s
--sought to break down the boundaries between rational and irrational, conscious and unconscious
Common Rhetorical Features
What Was Going on at that Time?
Philosophies or Big Ideas Expressed
- Self- Exile
- Indulgence
- A Sense of Moral Loss
- Spiritual Exclusion
- Youthful Idealism
- Allusion – a reference to a person, event, object, or work from literature that is expected to be known by the reader
- Symbolism – presenting a thing that represents both itself and something else
- Flashback- a section of a literary work that presents an event or series of events that occurred earlier than the current time in the work
- A general sense of moral loss or aimlessness apparent in literary figures
- End of World War I
- More people lived in cities than on farms (urbanization).
- Introduction of Consumer Society
- Women could vote and work white collar jobs
- Flappers: women who participated in "unladylike" behavior
- The Jazz Age: more dancing, Jazz bands, provided them with a sense of freedom
- Prohibition
http://www.gcisd-k12.org/cms/lib/TX01000829/Centricity/Domain/740/Historical%20Context%20for%20Gatsby.pdf
http://thegreatgatsby123.blogspot.com/2007/04/literary-devices_19.html
http://sparkcharts.sparknotes.com/lit/literaryterms/section5.php
"Lost Generation" Writers
- The "Lost Generation" were a group of writers who rejected the values of post World War I America.
- They have helped establish Literary styles writers still use today.
- People growing up in this time were known as the bad kids, because they did not follow the traditional values of American society.
Philosophies Expressed in Other Ways
Prominent Themes and Purposes
Ernest Hemingway
F. Scott Fitzgerald
Ezra Pound
Sherwood Anderson
Waldo Peirce
Sylvia Beach
Gertrude Stein
John Dos Passos
E.E. Cummings
Archibald MacLeish
Hart Crane
T.S. Eliot
- Modernism
- World War I destroyed the illusion that acting virtuously brought about good
- Radical experimentation in literary form and expression
- Age of dramatic social and political change
- Movie Industry Skyrocketed
- Silent Films became "Talkies", or those who had sound
- Jazz Age introduced new dances
- The Charleston, Cake-Walk, Turkey Trot, Black Bottom, Bunny Hug
- Jazz was heavily criticized for being immoral
- People often indulged in drinking and dancing to jazz music
Famous Literary Work of the Time
- The Great Gatsby- F. Scott Fitzgerald
- The Waste Land- T.S. Eliot
- The Sun Also Rises- Ernest Hemingway
- Babbitt- Sinclair Lewis
- The Sound and the Fury- William Faulkner
- The Old Man and the Sea- Ernest Hemingway
- All Quiet on the Western Front- Erich Maria Remarque