Postwar American Literature

Postwar American Literature

I. The 1940s Generation

Elizabeth Bishop: " Sestina", "One Art"

Postwar American Literature

Postmodernism: a term used to designate a multitude of

trends in the arts, philosophy, religion, technology, and many other areas that come after and deviate from the many 20th

century movements that constituted modernism.

Postwar American Literature II. The Confessional School Confessional Poetry: A form of Poetry in which the poet reveals very personal, in

timate, sometimes shocking information about himself or herself. Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and John Berry

man wrote poetry in the confessional vein. Robert Lowell: Life Studies Sylvia Plath: "Daddy", "Lady Lazarus"

Postwar American Literature

III. The Beat Generation:

A period featuring a group of American poets and novelists of the 1950s and 1960s — including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, William S. Burroughs, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti — who rejected established social and literary values.

Postwar American Literature

IV. The New York School ( a group of collagists, Dadaists, and

surrealists, in the 1960s)

V. The Black Mountain Poets (Black Mountain College)

Postwar American Literature

VI. Postwar Novel Important writers: Saul Bellow (1915-2005), Jewish writer, Nobel priz

e winner of 1976, whose main works are Dangling Man, The Adventures of Augie March, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Seize The Day, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Humboldt's Gift, More Die of Heartbreak, etc.

Postwar American Literature J.D. Salinger (1919- ): The Catcher in the Rye John Updike (1932- ), with his Rabbit pentalogy Joyce Carol Oates (1938- ): We Were the Mulvane

ys, Blonde, The Fall, etc. John Cheever (1912-1982 ): The Eenormous Radi

o and Other Stories Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964): A Good Man Is H

ard To Find, Everything That Rises Must Converge, etc.

Postwar American Literature

Novelist of the Absurd: Joseph Heller(1923-1999): Catch-22 Catch-22 is like no other novel It is one of

the funniest books ever written, a key-stone work in American literature, and even added a new term to the dictionary.