World War I gave rise to what we have come to know today as the “ Lost Generation”. The very denotation of the word ‘ lost’ has connotations of disorientation, directionless, aimlessness and wandering, essentially causing participants within the movement to be almost nomadic. The “Lost Generation” was first coined by Gertrude Stein and co-existed in the time of the “Roaring Twenties”, “The Jazz Age” and the “Prohibition” where almost everyone who was anyone drank to excess, hedonists thrived, and flappers were all the rage.
The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand was the tip of the iceberg which sparked World War I (1914-1918). Aside from the horrific death and destruction, done to the environment and civilization as we know it, consequential collateral damage rippled through various cultures, economies and societies. Although Germany had explicitly surrendered in 1918 and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles marked the end of the war, much political upheaval and drastic social transformations were made as a result.
With that, the Great World War gave rise to the ‘ Lost Generation’. The ‘Lost Generation’ movement refers to artists, writers, musicians and intellectuals alike who were generated as a reaction against ideologies, beliefs and values which were held due to their experiences during the War era. The psychological imprint left on survivors of the WWI stripped away and shattered their hopes, dreams and illusions regarding the nation state, peace, success and governance. This was evidently reflected and expressed vis a vis the uncertainty and cynicism of The Lost Generation’s work. By co-signing away their lives and ambitions in order to satisfy the nationalistic fervour in what was once thought of a noble cause, soldiers returned disillusioned, damaged, unstable and depressed on account of the unprecedented carnage they witnessed and lived through which caused them to shift.
“we’ll invariably go to the famous trilogy of Hemingway, Faulkner and Fitzgerald – the authors most representative of America’s iconic Lost Generation…The anxiety and hopelessness of the Lost Generation has become embedded in literary and cultural history” (West, 1) ”
France became the hotspot and epicentre for members and contributors of the Lost Generation to gather, branch out, and flourish as they ceased to acknowledge the mainstream norms of their respected fields and instead re-imagined and represented a less systematically ignorant and sensitized mode and style. Common and popular themes amongst the Lost Generation include the loss of tradition, decadence, uncertainty, gender roles, idealized past, dissipation, impotence and injured identities.
Authors of the Lost Generation played a large role in pioneering and transforming the manner in which we tackle, write, analyze and comprehend literature. F. Scott Fitzgerald serves as a prime example of a benefactor of the movement as his novels This Side of Paradise (1920) and The Great Gatsby (1925) captured the lifestyles, changes and outlooks that society adopted post-war time. In addition, T.S. Elliot’s poem “ The Wasteland” (1922) laments the despair, suffering, catastrophic nature of war. Finally, Earnest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (1926) chronicles expatriates of American and British descent who travel to Paris. Hemingway’s main protagonist went back and forth between Paris and Spain in order to distract himself from the physical and mental atrocities he faced due to the the war, concluding that the sun will inevitably continue to rise just as generations rise and fade over to the next.
Sources:
West, Elizabeth J. “How WWI Sparked the Artistic Movement that Transformed Black America.” (2017).
