LITERARY THEORY POST WORLDWAR II

   

Postmodernism is a literary movement which started after WWII.

The war had a profound impact on literature in all genres. As many American writers joined the war effort on the home front, as Dr. Seuss did, literature quickly became a convenient propaganda tool. This was especially true in the emerging genre of comic books, a genre still somewhat loosely defined by 1941. 

Impressive new novelists, poets, and playwrights emerged after the war. There was, in fact, a gradual changing of the guard. Not only did a new generation come out of the war, but its ethnic, regional, and social character was quite different from that of the preceding one.

The crisis experienced by people who witnessed the war in the post-war period; Fear of new wars and nuclear armament and fear of rising dictators were the main topics of literature. The reason why post-war themes were on the carpet for a long time in American literature was the Cold War with the Soviet Union.

In the place of sentimentalism and transcendentalism arose three related literary modes that dominated postbellum American fiction: realism, regionalism, and naturalism.

In the post-war period many British authors showed a deep interest in aesthetic and social matters rather than focusing on politics. Some of them tried to cultivate their own voices while others manifested a deep dissatisfaction and despair with respect to the British society.

After the War, a general sense of purposelessness and defeat led to a movement both in modernism and in anti-authoritarianism and nihilism in literature and in art. A sense of separation between the artist and writer and the general public was created during this time.

Charles Hamilton Sorley, Siegfried Sassoon, T.S. Eliot, Miss Edith Sitwell, W. H. Auden, C. Day Lewis, Mac Neice, Stephen Spender, Lehman and other poets have written about the agony, suffering, brutality and the futility of the wars.

Three Soldiers (1921) by John Dos Passos, The Enormous Room (1922) by E.E. Cummings, and A Farewell to Arms (1929) by Ernest Hemingway are among the most notable, but Eric Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), a powerful depiction of day-to-day trench warfare, may be the work most closely associated .