《英美文学选读》美国文学The Modern Period.docVIP

PART TWO：AMERICAN LITERATUREChapter 3 The Modern Period 　　概　述　　（一）两次世界大战期间美国文学产生的历史文化背景 　　1.两次世界大战　　The twentieth century began with a strong sense of social breakdown. A series of wars fought on the international scene during the first part of the century were to affect the life of Americans and their literary writings. Among them the two World Wars, especially the First World War（1914-1918）, became the emblem of all wars in the twentieth century, which means violence, devastation, blood and death.　　（1）On the one hand, the United States’s participation in World War I marked a crucial stage in the nation’s evolution to a world power. 　　（2）The technological revolution had brought about great changes in the life of the American people. 　　（3）Despite its booming industry and material prosperity, there was a sense of unease and restlessness underneath. All culminated in the collapse of the Stock Market in 1929, known as the Crash, which marked the beginning of The Great Economic Depression in the 1930s. Besides, political corruptions, organized crimes, the growth of radical labor force, and the terrorist drive of the Ku Klux Klan（三K党） made an already disorderly world even more turbulent. 　　（4）Along with the changes in the material landscape came the changes in the non-material system of belief and behavior. 　　（5）The censor of a great civilization being destroyed or destroying itself, social breakdown, and individual powerlessness and hopelessness became part of the American experience as a result of the First World War, with resulting feelings of fear, loss, disorientation and disillusionment. 　　2.马克思主义和弗洛伊德学说　　Apart from Darwinism, which was still a big influence over the writers of this period, the two thinkers whose ideas had the greatest impact on the period were the German Karl Marx and the Austrian Sigmund Freud.　　（1）Marx 　　（2）Freud 　　（3）Worthy of mention are William James, an American psychologist famous for his theory of “stream of consciousness,”（意识