Search for Innocence in American Modernism Essay -- Literature Essays

Search for Innocence in American Modernism American Literature from its very beginning has been center on around a theme of white. The Puritans wrote almost abandoning the corruption of Europe to experience innocence in a new world. The Romantics saw innocence and power in nature and often wrote of escaping from civilization to return to nature. After the obliging War, however, the innocence of the nation is challenged. The Realists focuse on the loss of innocence and in Naturalist works innocence is mostly gone. During these periods of American Literature it seems around as if a hole was being dug, a sort of change of innocence, and after World War I the Modernists called this hole the waste matter numerous Modernist works focus on society lost in the thriftlessness, precisely they hint at a way out. The path out of the wasteland is through a return to innocence. This is evident in the Modernist works of The wasteland by T. S. Eliot, Directive by Robert Frost, Babylon Revisited by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Hills Like White Elephants by Earnest Hemingway as will be shown in an analysis of the inhabitants of the wasteland and their search for innocence, the role of children and pregnancy in the wasteland, and the symbolism of water and rebirth. provided before I go on, I believe that I should first off clarify what I mean by a return to innocence. First, on that point is some confusion between innocence and ignorance. They are often used interchangeably. Because a person is innocent, it does not mean that he or she is asleep of reality. Innocence is almost like a different type of view. A child and an adult may interpret a single matter entirely differently, but this does not mean that the adult knows more about that thing. Innocence is open ... ...ed society and only through the return of innocence can there be hope of anything better. Works Cited Eliot, T.S. The wasteland. In The heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume II. emend ed by capital of Minnesota Lauter et al. Lexington, MA D.C. heath and Company, 1991 1447-1463. Fitzgerald, F. Scott. Babylon Revisited. In The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume II. Edited by Paul Lauter et al. Lexington, MA D.C. Heath and Company, 1991 1471-1485. Frost, Robert. Directive. In The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume II. Edited by Paul Lauter et al. Lexington, MA D.C. Heath and Company, 1991 1208-1209. Hemingway, Ernest. Hills Like White Elephants. In The Heath Anthology of American Literature, Volume II. Edited by Paul Lauter et al. Lexington, MA D.C. Heath and Company, 1991 1471-1485.