American Influence On Modernism

The United States reflected a loss of faith in traditional values and beliefs such as the American Dream during the modern artistic and cultural movement. Modernism originated in Europe and swept the United States at the turn of the 19th Century, having its core period between World War I and World War II, then continuing into the early 20th Century. During the modernist movement, citizens felt hidden behind the 19th Century Victorian Era history of art and literature in an entirety, causing them to lose trust in their own powers and potential. The literary movement came about due to the sudden and unexpected break from traditional ways of viewing and interacting with the world. Modernism began rejecting conventional truths and figures of authority, and moved away from religion. Experimentation and individualism became virtues where in the past, they were often discouraged. This new outlook caused modernist authors from the Lost Generation as well as the Harlem Renaissance to rebel using traditional styles of poetry and text to express their new feelings and understandings of their time, as well as by a desire to turn around all traditional manners. The modernist literary movement was driven by warfare, new writing experiments, and the celebration of freedom.
Warfare informed and inspired American literature writings and shocked the Western civilization as a whole during the modernist time period. These shocks …show more content…
This movement was a literary and intellectual flowering that encouraged a new black cultural identity. In the south, most blacks slaved away as sharecroppers trapped in an endless cycle of debt. Being deprived the right to vote as well as having the Jim Crow laws placed on them led many African
Imouhdine