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ABSTRACT
This study aims to the evaluation of the features
of the group of writers
who chose Paris as their new home to produce their works and the overall
dominant atmosphere in that specific time in the generation that has already
experienced war through comparative research methods. As a result, writers
of this group tried to find new approaches to report different contexts of modern
life. As a conclusion, regardless of every member
of the lost generation
bohemian and wild lifestyles, the range, creativity, and influence of works
produced by this community of American expatriates in Paris are remarkable.
Key words:
Lost Generation, Ernest Hemingway
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INTRODUCTION
American literature is the literature written or produced in the area of the
United States and its preceding colonies. Although its history is noticeably shorter
than the history of the literature of European and Asian countries, since the second
half of the 19th century, American literature has
gained wide development and
distinctive significance. The United States gave the world literature such classics
as Mark Twain, Edgar Poe, Ernest Hemingway, Ray Bradbury and many others.
The first half of the 20th century is known for artistic experiments.
Literature tries new pictorial means, destroys canonical forms and rhythms. Further
development is given to modernism - at the stage of avant-gardism. Paraliterature
becomes qualitatively new, the so-called «Mass», popular or commercial that is in
fact alternative to art. In the first half of the 20th century happen two world wars
1914-1918 and 1939-1945, the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman empires and royal
Russia crumble. On the world map new states are formed: they gain independence,
restore the statehood of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Poland,
the state of
Yugoslavia.
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Writers react to all these historical events, including in America. New styles
and works that demonstrate them are the product of the influence of these historical
events. They try to analyze the experience, draw conclusions.
Lost Generation is known as a term attributed to the group of writers who
were born between 1883 and 1900 and experienced many striking events which
happened in the first half of the twentieth century, especially the two World
Wars and the different social and political changes afterward. The term is coined
by Gertrude Stein and Hemingway (1964) made it
popular by mentioning it in
his The SunAlso Rises as an epigraph. Later on, Hemingway (1964) included
thisphrase in his A Moveable Feast, All of you young people who servedin the
war. You are a lost generation, he claimed Stein happened tohear this term in a
garage while having her car serviced. Most of thewriters who are known to be
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BEACH, S. 1991. Shakespeare and Company. University of Nebraska Press. p. 116. USA
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under this title are exiled Americanwriters that found
Paris suitable for their
Avant-guard activities.Puritan America was not a proper place for writers who
wanted to find freedom of existence and freshness of thought in a way they could
find anywhere else in the world. Paris got more freedom, it was cheaper and
sprightlier city which was entitled city of lights (Chandler, 1981). In the last
years of his life in his A Moveable Feast which was only published
posthumously, the American author Chandler describes Paris in this way:
There is never any ending to Paris and the memory of each person who
has lived in it differs from that of any other. We always returned to it no matter
who we were, nor how it was changed, nor with what difficulties now what ease,
it could be reached. It was always worth it and we received a return for
whatever we brought to it (1981: 236).
These writers were disillusioned by World Wars and lost faithin any
social, political and religious institutions. They believed ahuman being is no
longer capable of finding prosperity in the aforementioned concepts. Lost
Generation is not only a term which contains well-known writers but also a
modernist movement that influenced so many authors who never met these
writers, so it can be broadened to a term
which can be defined as a
movement with traceable elements in the majority of post-war writers and
pioneers of modernism. This term includes existential and psychological leftovers
of the Great War. Like other modernists, the writers of this movement tried to
seek sense in the world that lost its last traces of social,spiritual and
religious entities in a war that brought about theviciousness and devastation.
To find this meaning in the new era, theyturned
their trend from exterior
elements to interior ones and fromVictorian values, which were social and
moral, to existential and mental qualities of life. The experience of the war and
its brutality shattered their belief in the existence of a spiritual supremacy who
governs the world and a single absolute pathway to reach prosperity if it exists at
all.