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Chapter 12 - World War I and Cultural Change in America

from Part II - Cultural Moments and the American Literary Imagination

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 January 2021

By
Pearl James
Edited by
Jennifer Haytock
Jennifer Haytock
Affiliation:
State University College, Brockport, New York
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Summary

This essay explores a host of war-wrought cultural changes that postwar literature documented, celebrated, and critiqued. Literature itself changed in response to World War I and helped remake the social world in its wake in diverse and contradictory ways. Writers celebrated postwar modernity and freedom, but also articulated pessimism and developed new genres to convey the experience of violence. Writers discussed include John Dos Passos, Willa Cather, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Nella Larsen, Claude McKay, Ernest Hemingway, Dashiell Hammett, and more.

Keywords

US World War I writingGreat War literature
Type
Chapter
Information
War and American Literature , pp. 180 - 193
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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