Deadline for submissions: April 3, 2018
Full name/name of organization: Modernist Studies Association (MSA) 2018
Contact email: charlessumner@hotmail.com
The idea of a “lost generation” still has a hold on the popular imagination over ninety years after it was popularized via the epigraph of The Sun Also Rises. For literary scholars and historians, though, that idea is critically worn-out if not simply useless. This panel seeks to understand anew this old idea. Questions to be addressed include but are not limited to:
How has the idea of the lost generation been critically and historically misunderstood and/or abused?
Hemingway and Fitzgerald are the two figures we most closely associate with the lost generation trope, but of course there are many others whose work has contributed to it. Which authors have been neglected when it comes to understanding the lost generation as a literary critical and historical trope?
The lost generation concept has traditionally been noted in modernist fiction? How does it inform modernist poetry?
What purchase does this concept have on the twenty-first century literary critical imagination?
How can new ways of understanding this concept alter accepted understandings of modernism more broadly?
If interested, please submit a 300-word abstract by April 3, 2018 to charlessumner@hotmail.com.