About the “Lost Generation ”About the “Lost Generation ”.docVIP

About the “Lost Generation ” What does it Mean? It defines a sense of moral loss or aimlessness. The WWI destroyed the innocent ideas, many good young men went to the war and died, or returned damaged, both physically and mentally; their moral faith were no longer valid--- they were “Lost.” Where does it come from? From Gertrude Stein, an American woman writer, and a French garage owner; “une generation perdue.” What causes its appearance? WWI; economic boom; modern philosophy and psychology. To whom does it refer? Narrow sense: a group of American writers, including Hemingway, F.S.Fitzgerald, J.Dos Passos, E.E.Cummings, A.Macleish, Sherwood Anderson, and Hart Crane, etc. Broad Sense: the entire post -WWI American young generation. What are the main characteristics? Suffering from the war, losing beliefs, being cut off from the past, disillusioned, unable or unwilling to settle back into the routines of peacetime life, indulged in drinking and partying. What are the main subject matters: The lostness, nada and wound (Hemingway), the breaking up of the American dream (Fitzgerald), the sociological zero (Dos Passos), and nothing again nothing (Eliot) Hemingway as the spokesman of the “Lost Generation”: G. Stein’s remark to Hemingway: “you are all a lost generation.” Hemingway used the sentence “you are all a lost generation” as an epigraph for his first novel, The Sun Also Rises, which depicts a “lost generation” of postwar American drifters in France and Spain. Almost all of Hemingway’s works deal with the disillusionment of “the lost generation”, almost all his heroes are members of “the lost generation.” Hemingway is the leader of “the lost generation” in the adaptation of naturalistic technique and many modernistic methods. His novels dramatized the social history of “the lost generation.” Intimate connection between Hemingway and his heroes: he describes himself when he tells us the story of his heroes; Hemingway, “the lost generation,” and Hemingway’s h