Mark Twain

Twain is also known as a local colorist, who preferred to present social life
through portraits of the local characters of his regions, including people living in
that area, the landscape, and other peculiarities like the customs, dialects,
costumes and so on. Consequently, the rich material of his boyhood experience on
the Mississippi became the endless resources for his fiction, and the Mississippi
valley and the West became his major theme. Unlike James and Howells, Mark Twain
wrote about the lower-class people, because they were the people he knew so well
and their life was the one he himself lived. Moreover he successfully used local color
and historical settings to illustrate and shed light on the contemporary society.

Henry James
Jamess realism is characterized by his psychological approach to his subject
matter. His fictional world is concerned more with the inner life of human beings
than with overt human actions. His best and most mature works will render the
drama of individual consciousness and convey the moment-to-moment sense of
human experience as bewilderment and discovery. And we as readers observe
people and events filtering through the individual consciousness and participate in
his experience. This emphasis on psychology and on the human consciousness
proves to be a big breakthrough in novel writing and had great influence on the
coming generations. That is why James is generally regarded as the forerunner of
the 20th-century stream-of-consciousness novels and the founder of psychological
realism.
One of Jamess literary techniques innovated to cater for this psychological
emphasis is his narrative point of view. As the author, James avoids the authorial
omniscience as much as possible and makes his characters reveal themselves with
his minimal intervention. So it is often the case that in his novels we usually learn
the main story reading through one or several minds and share their perspectives.
This narrative method proves to be successful in bringing out his themes.
Jamess fame generally rests upon his novels and stories with the
international theme. These novels are always set against a larger international
background, usually between Europe and America, and centered on the
confrontation of the two different cultures with different groups of people
representing two different value systems. The typical pattern of the conflict
between the two cultures would be that of a young American man or an American
girl who goes to Europe and affronts his or her destiny.

Stephen Dreiser
With the publication of Sister Carrie (1900), Dreiser was launching himself
upon a long career that would ultimately make him one of the most significant
American writers of the school later known as literary naturalism. As a genre,
naturalism emphasized heredity and environment as important deterministic forces
shaping individualized characters who were presented in special and detailed
circumstances. At bottom, life was shown to be ironic, even tragic. Asked, during his
middle years, about what he thought earthly existence was, Dreiser described it as
a welter of inscrutable forces, in which was trapped each individual human being.
In his words, man is a victim of forces over which he has no control. To him, life is
so sad, so strange, so mysterious and so inexplicable. No wonder the characters
in his books are often subject to the control of the natural forcesespecially those
of environment and heredity.
The effect of Darwinist idea of survival of the fittest was shattering. It is not
surprising to find in Dreisers fiction a world of jungle, where kill or be killed was
the law. Dreisers naturalism found expression in almost every book he wrote.
Sister Carrie
Sister Carrie, a country girl, comes to Chicago to look for better life. She first stays
with her sister whose working-class home is, however, too poor to keep her. Winter
is coming and she is seriously ill. A traveling salesman, Drouet by name, comes to
her rescue and takes her home as his mistress. Sister Carries beauty appeals to
Drouets friend, Hurstwood, so that the respectable manager deserts his
comfortable home and family and forces her to elope with him. They run first to
Canada and then settle down in New York. For some time they experience dire
poverty. Sister Carrie goes out to find work on the stage, but Hurstwood proves
himself to be utterly unfit to survive. His downfall is complete when he commits
suicide one cold winter night. At the end of the book Sister Carrie is seen sitting in
her rocking-chair, still rocking.
Though received not favorably and attacked as immoral by the public in its
time, Sister Carrie best embodies Dreisers naturalistic belief that while men are
controlled and conditioned by heredity, instinct and chance, a few extraordinary and
unsophisticated human beings refuse to accept their fate wordlessly and instead
strive, unsuccessfully, to find meaning and purpose for their existence

Ezra Pound
Imagism
I.

Background

Imagism was influenced by French symbolism, ancient Chinese poetry and

Japanese literature haiku
What is an image?
An image is defined by Pound as that which presents an intellectual and
emotional complex in an instant of time, a vortex or cluster of fused ideas
endowed with energy. The exact word must bring the effect of the object before
the reader as it had presented itself to the poets mind at the time of writing.
Principles

Direct treatment of the thing, whether subjective or objective;

To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation;
As regarding rhythm, to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not
in the sequence of a metronome

Pounds earlier poetry is saturated with the familiar poetic subjects that
characterize the 19th century Romanticism: songs in praise of a lady, songs
concerning the poets craft, love and friendship, death, the transience of beauty and
the permanence of art, and some other subjects that Pound could call his own: the
pain of exile, metamorphosis, the delightful psychic experience, the ecstatic
moment, etc. Later he is more concerned about the problems of the modern culture:
the contemporary cultural decay and the possible sources of cultural renewal as
well. From perception of these things, stems the poets search for order, which
involves a search for the principles on which the poets craft is based.

T. S. ELIOT
works
poems
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
The Waste Land (epic)
Four Quartets
Plays
The Cocktail Party
The Confidential Clerk
Critical essays
Essays on Style and Order
Elizabethan Essays
The Use of Poetry and The Use of Criticisms
point of view
(1)The modern society is futile and chaotic.
(2)Only poets can create some order out of chaos.
(3)The method to use is to compare the past and the present.
Style
(1)Fresh visual imagery, flexible tone and highly expressive rhythm
(2)Difficult and disconnected images and symbols, quotations and allusions
(3)Elliptical structures, strange juxtapositions, an absence of
bridges
The Waste Land: five parts
(1)The Burial of the Dead
(2)A Game of Chess
(3)The Fire Sermon
(4)Death by Water
(5)What the Thunder Said
The Waste Land has generally been accepted as Eliots most important single
poem. In Eliots view, the waste land stands for Western Europe, or for
Western civilization as a whole, which brought to the human beings large-scale
destruction and slaughter in the world-wide war and spiritual and cultural
degeneration. Therefore, in The Waste Land, Eliot aimed above all else at a
search for regeneration for the human race, and in this sense the poem has its
undeniable significance in its negation of the bourgeois status quo in Western
Europe and in its quest for change.
The poem divided into five sections. The first section deals chiefly with theme
of death, sterility, and meaninglessness of life. The title of the section, The
Burial of the Dead, suggests the death and burial of the Western world or
the waste land.

The second section, entitled A Game of Chess, emphasizes the

meaninglessness of love and lust in the human world or the waste land.

The third section, The Fire Sermon, deals chiefly with the river. The
river of the modern world is contrasted with that in the Elizabethan days: the
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16th-century sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song in Spensers

Prothalamion() celebrating his own wedding is contrasted with the
debris left on the river banks after the feastings and love-makings of the
evening before in modern Western cities. The section ends with the repeated
words of burning to indicate the fall of a modern city or of the whole
modern civilization, deserted by God.
The fourth and shortest section, Death by Water, more directly and markedly
points to the theme of death. The section ends on the general warning of death
waiting for everybody.
The fifth and last section finally touches upon the Grail legend. The title of the
section is What the Thunder Said. According to the Grail legend (the Christian
legend of the Holy Grail), only if a questing knight goes to the Chapel Perilous,
situated in the heart of the waste land, and there asks certain ritual questions
about the Grail (i.e. Cup) and the Lance (which were originally male and
female fertility symbols respectively), this Waste Land symbolizing death, infirmity
and sterility can be revived. In the section, after a cocks crow, spoke the
thunder: Datta meaning give, Dayadhvam meaning sympathize, and
Damyata meaning control, these three words contain the secret for the
regeneration of the waste land.

F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

life participant in 1920s
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works
This Side of Paradise
Flappers (a fashionable young woman in the late 1920s) and Philosophers
The Beautiful and the Damned
The Great Gatsby
Tender is the Night
All the Sad Young Man
The Last Tycoon
point of view
He expressed what the young people believed in the 1920s, the so-called
American Dream is false in nature.
He had always been critical of the rich and tried to show the integrating effects of
money on the emotional make-up of his character. He found that wealth altered
peoples characters, making them mean and distrusted. He thinks money brought
only tragedy and remorse.
His novels follow a pattern: dream lack of attraction failure and despair.
His ideas of American Dream
It is false to most young people. Only those who were dishonest could become rich.
Style
Fitzgerald was one of the great stylists in American literature. His prose is smooth,
sensitive, and completely original in its diction and metaphors. Its simplicity and
gracefulness, its skill in manipulating the relation between the general and the
specific reveal his consummate artistry.
The Great Gatsby
Narrative point of view Nick
He is related to everyone in the novel and is calm and detected observer who is
never quick to make judgements.
Selected omniscient point of view
Fitzgeralds greatness lies in the fact that he found intuitively in his personal
experience the embodiment of that of the nation and created a myth out of
American life. The story of The Great Gatsby is a good illustration. Gatsby is a poor
youth from the Midwest. He falls in love with Daisy, a wealthy girl, but is too poor
to marry her. The girl is then married to a rich young man, Tom Buchanan.
Determined to win his lost love back, Gatsby engages himself in bootlegging and
other shady activities thus earning enough money to buy a magnificent imitation
French villa. There he spreads dazzling parties every weekend in the hope of
alluring the Buchanans to come. They finally come and Gatsby meets Daisy again,
only to find that the woman before him is not quite the ideal love of his dreams. A
sense of loss and disillusionment comes over him. Then Daisy kills a woman, who
happens to be her husbands lover, in an accident, and plots with Tom to shift the
blame on Gatsby. So Gatsby is shot and the Buchanans escape.
Gatsbys life follows a clear pattern: there is, at first, a dream, then a
disenchantment, and finally a sense of failure and despair. In this, Gatsbys
personal experience approximates the whole of the American experience up to the
first few decades of this century. America had been a fresh, green breast of the
new world, had pandered to the last and greatest of all human dreams and
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promised something like the orgiastic future for humanity. Now the virgin forests
have vanished and made way for modern civilization, the only fitting symbol of
which is the valley of ashes the living hell. Here modern men live in sterility,
meaninglessness and futility as best illustrated by Gatsbys essentially pointless
parties. The crowds hardly know their host; many come and go without invitation.
The music, the laughter, and the faces, all blurred as one confused mass, signify
the purposelessness and loneliness of the party-goers beneath their masks of
relaxation and joviality. The shallowness of Daisy whose voice is full of money,
the restless wickedness of Tom, the representative of the egocentric, careless rich,
and Gatsby who is, on the one hand, charmingly innocent enough to believe that
the past can be recovered and resurrected, but on the other hand, both corrupt and
corrupting, tragically convinced of the power of money, however it was made the
behavior of these and other people like the Wilsons all clearly denote the
vanishing of the great expectations which the first settlement of the American
continent had inspired. The hope is gone; despair and doom have set in. Thus
Gatsbys personal life has assumed a magnitude as a culture-historical allegory
for the nation. Here, then, lies the greatest intellectual achievement that Fitzgerald
ever achieved

Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961

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He felt that WWI had broken Americas culture and traditions, and separated from
its roots. He wrote about men and women who were isolated from tradition,
frightened, sometimes ridiculous, trying to find their own way.He condemned war as
purposeless slaughter, but the attitude changed when he took part in Spanish Civil
War when he found that fascism was a cause worth fighting for.He wrote about
courage and cowardice in battlefield. He defined courage as an instinctive
movement towards or away from the centre of violence with self-preservation and
self-respect, the mixed motive. He also talked about the courage with which to face
tragedies of life that can never be remedied.
Hemingway is essentially a negative writer. It is very difficult for him to say yes.
He holds a black, naturalistic view of the world and sees it as all a nothing and all
nada.
The lost generation
This term has been used again and again to describe the people of the postwar
years. It describes the American who remained in Paris as a colony of expatriates
or exiles, the writers like Hemingway who lived in semi-poverty, and the Americans
who returned to their native land with an intense awareness of living in an
unfamiliar changing world.
After World War I, the young disappointed American writers, such as Hemingway,
Pound, Cummings, Fitzgerald, chose Paris as their place of exile. They came from
the East or the Middle West of the U. S. A., and most of them had been shocked or
wounded in the war. An American woman writer named Gertrude Stern, who had
lived in Paris since 1903, welcomed these young writers to her apartment which was
already famous as a literary salon. She called them the Lost Generation, because
they had cut themselves off from their past in America in order to create new types
of writing which had never been tried before. The Lost Generation is also painted
in the writers writings. The young English and American expatriates, men and
women, were caught in the war and cut off from the old values and yet unable to
come to terms with the new era when civilization had gone mad. They wandered
pointlessly and restlessly, enjoying things like fishing, swimming, bullfight and
beauties of nature, but they were away all the while that the world is crazy and
meaningless and futile. Their whole life is undercut and defeated.
In the novel The Sun Also Rises, Jake Barnes, Robert Cohn, and Brett Ashley, who
were both physically and spiritually wounded in the war, are seen wandering
aimlessly and, restless and impotent, enjoying things like fishing, swimming, a
bullfight, and beauties of nature but aware all the while that the world is crazy and
meaningless and futile. Their whole life is undercut and defeated. Jake Barnes, the
protagonist, wounded and made sexually impotent in the war, finds life a nightmare
after it. The only strength to live on with any dignity comes from nowhere but
himself. He comes to see that, in a world in which all is vanity and vexation of
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spirit, there is nothing one can do but to take care of ones own life and be tough
against fate and tough with grace under pressure. Jake Barnes is really a Fisher King
in an Eliotian Waste Land. His physical impotence is a token of modern mans
spiritual impotence.
William Faulkner
point of view
He generally shows a grim picture of human society where violence and cruelty are
frequently included, but his later works showed more optimism. His intention was to
show the evil, harsh events in contrast to such eternal virtues as love, honour, pity,
compassion, self-sacrifice, and thereby expose the faults of society. He felt that it
was a writers duty to remind his readers constantly of true values and virtues.
themes
history and race
He explains the present by examining the past, by telling the stories of several
generations of family to show how history changes life. He was interested in the
relationship between blacks and whites, especially concerned about the problems of
the people who were of the mixed race of black and white, unacceptable to both
races.
Stream-of-consciousness or interior monologue, is one of the modern literary
techniques. It was first used in 1922 by the Irish novelist James Joyce. This
modernistic trend in 1920s, deeply influenced by the psycho-analytic theories of
Sigmund Freud, adopted the psycho-analytic approach in literary creation to explore
the existence of subconscious and unconscious elements in the mind. In English
fiction, the novels of stream-of-consciousness were represented by James Joyce and
Virginia Woolf. Those novels broke through the bounds of time and space, and
depicted vividly and skillfully the unconscious activity of the mind fast changing and
flowing incessantly, particularly the hesitant, misted, distracted and illusory
psychology people had when they faced reality. Britain was the center of the novels
of stream-of-consciousness. The modern American writer William Faulkner
successfully advanced this technique. In his stories, action and plots were less
important than the reaction and inner musings of the narrators. Time sequences
were often dislocated. The reader feels himself to be a participant in the stories,
rather than an observor. A high degree of emotion can be achieved by this
technique. But it also makes the stories hard to understand.
The modern American writer William Faulkner used a remarkable range of
techniques, themes and tones in his fiction. He successfully advanced two modern
literary techniques, one was stream-of-consciousness, the other was multiple points
of view. Faulkner was a master at presenting multiple points of view, showing within
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the same story how the characters reacted differently to the same person or the
same situation. The use of this technique gave the story a circular form wherein one
event was the center, with various points of view radiating from it. The multiple
points of view technique makes the reader recognize the difficulty of arriving at a
true judgment.

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