上海外国语大学美国文学课件：chapter 12.ppt

* * Chapter Twelve：The Thirties Social Background of This Period： The mood of the thirties was different. The Wall Street crash of 1929 set the tone for the writing of the decade. As the Depression spread, life became a nightmarish experience of want, poverty, and absolute misery. Economic disaster, and the wretched workless existence for the masses of the people brought home to all the unnerving realization that the system had collapsed. Everything seemed to be disintegrating all of a sudden and all at once, and an ordered, rational existence proved to be impossible. There was widespread panic. If there had been any hope in the frustrating roaring twenties, there was, for many, sheer despair in the bleak years of the thirties. It is true that, when F. D. Roosevelt came into the White House, he brought with him a refreshing breeze of hope and optimism into it and into the country. Roosevelt was clever enough to borrow freely from the socialist programs of the previous decades and offered his synthesis of them as the New Deal which helped toward dispelling the crisis — laden atmosphere hanging over the country. He found ways to obtain money from financiers and industrialists to support projects like those of the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Federal Theatre, all of which restored a measure of confidence to the Second World War that the country felt safe again. The war saved the United States. Faced with the new reality of want and despair, American writers found themselves trying to find their function in the society. It was apparent that social concern was topmost in the minds of many authors, and that social involvement was to be the major feature of the literature of the thirties. Just as the crisis of 1893 was in some measure instrumental in introducing the violence of the naturalistic rhetoric in the last years of the nineteenth century, so the impact of the crisis of the thirties brought about a revival of that tradition, with the shadow of Dreiser and