Search for Innocence in American Modernism

Looking for pure American literature in the modernism of the United States was an innocent theme from the beginning. Puritan wrote about abandoning corruption in Europe to find innocence in the new world. Romanticists are seeing innocence and power in nature, often writing words to escape civilization and return to nature. However, after the Civil War, the country 's innocence was challenged. Realists focus on losing innocence, and in naturalist works, purity is almost gone.

A series of seemingly stable and safe values ​​of the 19th century and a series of wars, western fight wasteland, modernism, technical revolution, and internationalism, the "end" of the US "naive" are declared again and again It was. The era of world war. And a new world order that challenged the American isolationism which is not so far. In fact, Henry Mey wrote "The End of American Innocence" (1959), which he explored "the end of American rule" (three wonderful ideas) from 1912 to 1917. Or value) the way they collapsed due to external and internal pressure. Contradictions These three wonderful ideas are to believe the certainty of the universal moral value in the West, the second is to believe the inevitability of human progress, especially in the United States, and the third to believe in the world Traditional European luxury culture (especially literature and art) as a model of. . These previously resolved beliefs were destroyed in the First World War, and the story is like this.

World War I was a turning point in America's life, showing innocent loss and strong disillusionment to tradition. American writers are deeply influenced by the idea of ​​modernism that needs a break with traditional themes and styles. The three foundations of the American dream is to believe that this land is a rich new Eden (beautiful, blessed, endless commitment), a firm belief in progress, and confidence for the individual's ultimate victory. Great Gatsby (1925) reflects the promise and disappointment of the new Eden