American Modernism - American Modernist Literature

American Modernist Literature

American Modernism covered a wide variety of topics including race relations, gender roles, and sexuality. It reached its peak in America in the 1920s up to the 1940s. Celebrated Modernists include Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, and while largely regarded as a romantic poet, Walt Whitman is sometimes regarded as a pioneer of the modernist era in America.

Influenced by the first World War, many American modernist writers explored the psychological wounds and spiritual scars of the war experience. The economic crisis in America at the beginning of the 1930s also left a mark on literature, such as John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. A related issue is the loss of self and need for self-definition, as workers faded into the background of city life, unnoticed cogs within a machine yearning for self-definition. American modernists echoed the mid-19th-century focus on the attempt to "build a self"—a theme illustrated by Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Madness and its manifestations seems to be another favorite modernist theme, as seen in Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, Hemingway's The Battler and Faulkner's That Evening Sun. Nevertheless, all these negative aspects led to new hopes and aspirations, and to the search for a new beginning, not only for the contemporary individuals, but also for the fictional characters in American modernist literature.

The modernist period also brought changes to the portrayal of gender roles and especially to women's role in society, and the literature reflects the emancipation and societal change of the era. Gatsby, for example, deals with such topics as gender interaction in a mundane society.

Race relations between blacks and whites, the gap between what was expected of each of the two and what the facts were, or, better said, prejudice in the society of the time are themes dealt with in most of the modernist American literature, whether we speak about prose (Jean Toomer, Zora Neale Hurston, Faulkner, Hemingway), or about drama (O'Neill). For instance, stereotypes such as the lack of education, dialectical English and portrayals of blacks as dangerous are not done away with in modernist literature, but remain present. However, in stories such as Hemingway's The Battler, there seems to be a reversal of stereotypes. The African-American character in this short story proves out to be a kind, calculated and polite man whose good manners and carefully chosen vocabulary are easily noticeable from the first moment he appears in the story.

Black writers also need to be mentioned when talking about modernism in America, as they seem to have brought a breakthrough in literature and mentality as far as the self-esteem of African-Americans is concerned. The folk-oriented poetry of Sterling Brown and Langston Hughes, for example, written in a rhythm fit to be either sung or told as a story, melancholically describes the joyful attitude of Afro-Americans towards life, in spite of all the hardships they were confronted with. The protagonists of these poems are shown in such a light which offers insight into their cultural identity and folklore. An insight into culture and folklore is also a topic that prose deals with, such as, for example, Toomer's Blood-Burning Moon and Faulkner's That Evening Sun.