Ernest hemingway the writer of the lost generation course work

 
1.3.The origin of the lost generation 
To refer to the Lost Generation’s origin, one should firstevaluate the 
Modernist movement. Although these movements were shaped outside the United 
States, it can be also defined in the American context. There are many 
suppositions about the starting date of the Lost Generation movement but as 
Bernard DeVoto, critic and historian, asserts nobody can decide just what a 
literary generation is because one cannot categorize each writer in a 
particular generation due to the continuous procedure of making up of such 
generations:
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The time scale is ambiguous: the first novelist of the Younger 
Generation began publishing in 1900, its first poet died in 1886, and its twilight 
genius is only thirty-five. No date can be agreed on for its beginning: Mr. 
[Carl] Van Doren believes that it began with the Armistice, . The end is also 
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GOODY, A. 2013. The modernist party. Edinburgh University Press. p. 148. UK

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undetermined. We are told that the period closed with 1929 and the Wall Street 
crash, But wherever you fix a date for the beginning of dotage, you find that 
nine-tenths of the reasonably good writing since that deadline has been done by 
men you have extinguished. (1936: 18) 
This younger generation gets its meaning in its opposite older generation. If 
the younger generation of writers in the twentieth-century American literature 
is mentioned, this term distinguishes them from the Victorians. There are 
different explanations for the younger generation and it is similar to the term lost 
generation in this respect. This term was used by other authors in different 
articles like A Generation Lost? Written by Florence Valentine Keys but their 
implication did not contain any comprehensive mode of cultural and literary 
meaning and it only referred to a generation of soldiers who could not get back 
to their normal lives after the war. Lost generation as a movement includes an 
entire population and it first showed up as the term known today in 
Hemingway’s (1964) The Sun Also Rises as an epigraph. Although Hemingway 
(1964) tried to explain this epigraph, not as a hollow and absurd concept in his 
novel, the same characteristics of this age’s youth, which could be spotted in 
other works of contemporary writers, turned this term to an expression that 
described the post-war generation of people who had common features. 
Hemingway received a variety of feedbacks for using Stein’s words as an 
epigraph and the mood of being lost in his novel, but after publishing this 
book it soon turned to be a great success and it was widely accepted in the 
American context as a good representative of the lifestyles, relations and 
disillusionment of this generation.Still, while the early critical fanfare for The Sun 
Also Rises was drowned out by raves for more established writers, the novel 
soon became a life handbook for young Americans at home and abroad.
It was a good novel and became a craze, Cowley writes, young men tried 
to get as imperturbably drunk as the hero, young women of good families took 
a succession of lovers in the same heartbroken fashion as the heroine, they all 
talked like Hemingway heroes and the name was fixed (1964: 39).Because of 

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this mass influence on public perception of life,the meaning of the Lost 
Generation transformed from youth culture regarded as the younger generation 
to refer to this movement’s writers who had literary or aesthetic aspirations 
(Nicholls, 2004). By this shift, some scholars concluded that these writers tried 
to highlight their role in the history by framing their cultural manner, but it has 
not been investigated, proven and generally accepted. Obviously, what is 
agreeable is that self-conscious and innovative writing of Lost Generation 
writers set up modernism as the predominant social venture of the main 
portion of the first half of the twentieth century. Also, historians admit the 
significant role this movement played in the alterations happened after their arrival 
and activities: “The Twenties were really the formative years of modern American 
history” (Mowry, 1936: 19).
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