engleski

U.S. Literature's Images of the Great War and the Loss of Innocence

Even though the Great War signalled the entry of the United States onto the world stage and anticipated the American century, its images are not readily forthcoming in American modernist literature. Even so, some of the leading U.S. modernist authors have used the First World War to launch their careers thus highlighting a degree of difference in the war's impact on Europe as opposed to the United States. If at the end of the war the United States came out victorious and barely scarred by the destruction, it was also a moment where a subtle but imminent shift occurred as the locus of cultural, political, and other authority transferred from Europe to America. One of the leading American modernists, John Dos Passos was one of the authors to register in his war-themed novel The Three Soldiers (1921) not only the ravages of war but also the Bildung of the characters in the frame of the global conflict and also the underlying and long-term consequences of the war for the two societies. Arguably, the situation of the war was a moment of emergence and trial not only for the fictional characters in Dos Passos's novel but also for a generation of U.S. American modernist writers, who were able to launch a powerful strain of national literature. In the process of gaining experience Dos Passos, alongside the other briefly mentioned authors (T.S. Eliot, Louis Adamic, Ernest Hemingway, F.S. Fitzgerald) consolidated an American literature in its own right.

John Dos Passos, Three Soldiers, the Great War, American literature, modernism, Bildung

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