Modernism in American literature was fueled by domestic shifts like increased urbanization and new technologies as well as international events like World War 1 and the Great Depression. Poets like Emily Dickinson, Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, and T.S. Eliot experimented with free verse and imagery to express modern life and disillusionment. Novelists like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner used techniques like stream of consciousness and multiple perspectives to realistically portray the post-war era. Overall, American modernist writers innovated forms and addressed contemporary issues through their literature.

1. MODERNISM IN
AMERICAN LITERATURE
By
Zia Ur Rahman
Ph.D.Scholar in English Literature

2. Introduction
• Modernism was a cultural wave and artistic movement that grew strength
first in Europe in the early 20th century and then swept to the united states.
• In America Modernism was fueled by two factors:
• Domestic Shifts
• Increase in city life (industrialization)
• Advancement in Technology and in its effect on the way of life (techno culture n postmodern
terms)
• Economic Boom/Big Boom
• International Shifts
• The World War 1
• Western youth was rebelling, angry and disillusioned with the war. They held the older generation
as responsible.
• Intellectual currents like Freudian psychology and Marxism implied a “godless” worldview and led to
the breakdown of traditional views.
• The World Depression of 1930s
• It affected most of the population of the US.Workers lost their jobs and facories shut
down,busiesses failed,farmers unable to harvest
• Modernism impacted music, art and literature by:
• radically undoing the traditional forms
• Expressing a sense of modern life as a sharp break from the past and its rigid
conventions.(Jazz Age)

3. Modernism in American Literature
• Like the English writers, the Americans too experimented with
form(setting,narrative techniques,plot structure), content(they
could and should write about anything-no subject too dignified
or undegnified) and style in different genres of literature.
• Following are these experiments inform content and style in
different genres:
• 1.Poetry
• Emily Dickenson and Walt Whitman are thought to be the mother and father
of the modernist movement in America.
• Both changed the world of poetry in mid 19th century with profoundly different
styles.
• Strictly American expressions.Not the English models.
• Their readiness to tell the truth regardless of how dangerous it could be
• I’m Nobody! Who are you?
Are you – Nobody – too?
Then there’s a pair of us!
Don't tell! they'd advertise – you know!
• The sense of anonymity

4. Continued….
• Walt Whitman is known as the father of free verse in America. His collection, the
leaves of grass open with “Song of Myself”
• I CELEBRATE myself, and sing myself,
• And what I assume you shall assume,
• For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
• Ezra Pound was the pioneer of the Imagist movement. He had resided in
London and met there the British modernists.
• Imagist poets wrote shorter poems and choose there words vey carefully so that their
work could be rich and direct.
• His two lines poem, in a station at Metro sums up the movement:
• The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.
• invites the reader to relate urban life to the natural world

5. Continued…
• TS Eliot is another American who experimented with these forms.
• His poem , The Love Song of J.Alfred Profrock tries to revel that modern life
provides no answers to the questions of life:
• Let us go then, you and I,
• When the evening is spread out against the sky
• Like a patient etherized upon a table
• His other poems like Hallow Men and the Waste Land as the titles suggest
disallusionment.
• The War Poets/Trench Poets shifted the attention towds the state of the
world.
• Poets like Wilfred Owen (What passing bells for those..),Seigfred Sasson and
Issac Rosenberg through imagery of different types revealed the realities of war.
• Other poets like Robert Frost, ee comings,Wallace Stevens and William
Carlos Williams also contributed.
• Ee comings experiments with style and language…

6. Continued…
• 2-Fiction
• In fiction too experimented with viewpoint and form. Also more realistic
writings.
• Earnest Hemingway’s “A Farewell to Arms” and “The Sun also Rises” were
reprentatives of the era.
• Hemingway wrote of war, death, and “the lost generation”
• F.Scott Fitzgerald’s the Great Gatsby is also a representaive of this age.
• The story is presented in Fragments, from multiple points of view and no central
authority.It destroys the conventional forms of language by deliberately breaking rules
of syntax and structure.
• William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury is written in the stream of
consciousness technique
• It revels te racial and class differences.

7. Conclusion
• The American modernist literature highlighted innovation
in the form of language, narration, and style which
definitely has close link wih modernity.
• Thematically, the works are enriched with contemporary
issues such as war, late capitalism, science and
psychology.