1.American Naturalism
American naturalism was a new and harsher realism, and like realism, it had come from Europe. Naturalism was an outgrowth of realism that responded to theories in science, psychology, human behavior and social thought current in the late nineteenth century. In the decade of the nineteenth century, with the development of industry and modern science, intelligent minds began to see that man was no longer a free ethical being in a cold, indifferent and essentially Godless universe. In this chance world he was both helpless and hopeless.
European writers like Emile Zola had developed this acute social consciousness. They saw man’s life as governed by the two forces of heredity and environment, forces absolutely beyond man’s control.
American naturalism had been shaped by the war, by the social upheavals that undermined the comforting faith of an earlier age, and by the disturbing teachings of Darwinism. American literary naturalists dismissed the validity of comforting moral truths. They attempted to achieve extreme economic classes who were determined by their environment and heredity. In presenting the extremes of life, the naturalists sometimes displayed an affinity to the sensationalism of early romanticism, but unlike their romanticism predecessors, the naturalism emphasized that the world was amoral, that men and women had no free will, that the destiny of humanity was misery in
life and oblivion in death. The pessimism and deterministic ideas of naturalism pervaded the works of such American writers as Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London and Theodore Dreiser.
2.Imagist poetry/ Imagism
1)Imagism came into being in Britain and U.S around 1910 as a
reaction to the traditional English poetry to express the sense of fragmentation and dislocation.
2)The imagists, with Ezra Pound leading the way, hold that the most
effective means to express these momentary impressions is through the use of one dominate image.
3)Imagism is characterized by the following three poetic principles:
A.direct treatment of subject matter;
B.economy of expression;
C.as regards rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musical
phrase, not in the sequence of metronome.
4)Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro” is a well-known imagist poem.
3. The Lost Generation
1) The lost generation is a term first used by stein to describe the post-war
I generation of American writers: men and women haunted by a sense of betrayal and emptiness brought about by the destructiveness of the war.
2) Full of youthful idealism, these individuals sought the meaning of life, drank excessively, had love affairs and created some of the finest
