A Cultural Study Of Malcolm Cowley And The Lost Generation

As an influential trend and school of literature emerging in the 20th century, the Lost Generation occupies an important position in the history of literature both in America and in the world. Malcolm Cowley's writing career was closely connected with the experience of the Lost Generation writers.Although we have read a great deal about the Lost Generation, when it comes to Malcolm Cowley, he seems to be a myth. On one hand, we feel him an acquaintance because we quote pages of Cowley's Exile's Return from time to time when we study Hemingway, Dos Passos, Fitzgerald, Eliot, Stein, and Joyce. Exile's Return: A Narrative of Ideas (1934) was the first book of its kind to give an authoritative design of interpretation of the social, historical, and literary forces at work on the Lost Generation. Along with his later critical work on writers such as William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, it made him a significant figure in the twentieth-century American literary history.On the other hand, since for a long time the studies concerning Cowley have been inconsiderably far from enough, in this sense, we feel Cowley a stranger. As we know, the former studies of the Lost Generation usually concentrate on some famous Lost Generation writers and their literary works, such as Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who have been just considered as the representatives of their time. But obviously few of those studies are stated from the angle of Malcolm Cowley.Scholarly attention the author of this thesis has directed to the Lost Generation is quite a distinct perspective from others. It has been in regard to Malcolm Cowley, who was a member of the post-war generation. With his coevals, he experienced the First World War, witnessing the destruction and despair from it. The beckoning promise of opportunity in art and life in Paris attracted him and made him an exile. Besides his identity as a participant, Cowley was also a spectator. He was justified in presenting his spectatorial sense of his generation and the history of American letters...