现代主义文学
流派介绍
Modernism began in Germany in the 1860s, spread world wide, and ended in the 1940s. It was a movement of experiments in new technique including many trends, Symbolism（象征主义）, Futurism（未来主义）, Expressionism（表现主义）, the stream of consciousness（意识流）, Imagism（意象主义）, Surrealism（超现实主义）, etc.
主要特点：
Theme: fragmentation
Character: anti-hero
Plot: pessimism
Style: creative
代表人物：
Ezra Loomis Pound(1885-1972)
Position:
The father of modern American poetry, American self-conscious innovator and one of the most important imagist poets and critics of his time
Works:
the Cantos, a modern epic, which he wrote for over 15 years. The Cantos are separate poems of varying lengths, combining reminiscence, meditation, description, and transcription from books Pound read.
Thomas Stearns Eliot(1888-1965)
Position:
a poet, playwright, and literary critic, the acknowledged leader of the new poetry and criticism and the almost dominated poetry and criticism between two world wars.
His great work: the waste land
It catches precisely the state of culture and society after the world warⅠand graphically illustrates the spiritual poverty of the West of the time
a central text of modernism
His best work:
Four Quartets, a group of four long poems, led to his receipt of the Nobel Prize in 1948
Wallace Stevens(1879-1955)
Position:
one of the most accomplished poets of his time,the most consistent, self-assured spokesman for the rationalist humanist tradition with its root in the late 18th century French
Some of his best-known poems ：
“Valley Candle”, “Anecdote of the Jar”, “Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock”, “The Emperor of Ice-Cream”, “The Idea of Order at Key West”, “Sunday Morning”, “The Snow Man”, and “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”
E.A. Robinson(1869-1935)
Position:
a transitional poet between the 19th and 20th century, America’s greatest poet in the 1920s.
His works:
collected Poems in 1921, won the Pulitzer.
The Man Who Dies Twice(1924), won the Pulitzer for the second time.
his long narrative poem Tristram(1927), won him the Pulitzer for the third time.
Robert Lee Frost(1874-1963)
Position:
One of the most popular and critically respected American poets
won Pulitzer Prizes four times
1924 for New Hampshire: A Poem With Notes and Grace Notes
1931 for Collected Poems
1937 for A Further Range
1943 for A Witness Tree
Style:
he used simple language, a graceful style, and traditional forms of poetry
he achieved an internal dynamics in his poetry by playing the rhythms of ordinary speech against the formal patterns of line and stanza.
Ernest Hemingway(1899-1961)
Position:
an American author and journalist, spokesman for the Lost Generation
His works:
The Sun Also Rises (1926)
A Farewell to Arms (1929)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940)
The Old Man and the Sea(1951)
A Moveable Feast (1964, posthumous)
Ice-berg theory of writing
his sentence only gives one small bit of meaning, and the rest is implied. One must go very deep beneath the surface to understand the full meaning of his writing.
Hemingway’s writing emphasizes emotion.
Francis Scott Fitzgerald(1896-1940)
position:
an American author of novels and short stories, the spokesman of the 1920s, he is widely regarded as one of the greatest American writers of the 20th century, considered a member of the “Lost Generation” of the 1920s
novel:
This Side of Paradise, The Beautiful and Damned, The Great Gatsby—his most famous—and Tender Is the Night
John Steinbeck(1902-1968)
Position:
the foremost writer of the Great Depression, a great spokesman for the oppressed, writing about the poverty-stricken people in their sufferings.
Masterpiece:
The Grapes of Wrath
This novel alternates the story of the travails of the Joad family and sharecroppers driven out of Oklahoma that generalize the Great Depression as a nation’s tragedy.
