Features of Modern Age in American literature

The term "modern" is applied to the literature written since the beginning of World War I in 1914 to the conclusion of World War II in 1945. This half-century has been one of the outstanding periods American literature. It has been marked by persistent and multi-dimensioned experiments in subject matter and form, and has produced major achievements in all the literary genres. The poets include Frost and T.S. Eliot; the novelist, Joyce, Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. American writers of the period, who felt disillusioned by the experience of World War I, came to be called the Lost Generation.

The most important points of the Modern Age are:

• Stylistic innovations - disruption of traditional syntax and form; breaking away from patterned responses and predictable forms 
•  Artist's self-consciousness about questions of form and structure. The artist is generally less appreciated but more sensitive, even more heroic, than the average person. He challenges tradition and reinvigorates it.
• Obsession with primitive material and attitudes.
• International perspective on cultural matters.

The most used themes are:

• Collectivism vs the authority of the individual.
• The impact of the 1918 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia.
•  The Jazz Age.
•  The passage of 19th Amendment in 1920 giving women the right to vote.
•  Prohibition of the production, sale, and consumption of alcoholic beverages, 1920-33.
•  The stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression of the 1930s and their impact

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