Jazz Age Research Paper

The Jazz Age: Beyond the Music - Research Paper

The Jazz Age emerged from the ashes of World War I and came to a halt with the Great Depression, yet it was a time of new historical developments and literature. The Jazz Age represents the newfound prosperity and shifting of American life; it was a fresh page in the book of American History, and Americans wrote their stories, beliefs, and new culture within it.

Recently, the world had been faced with the Great War, and each nation was recovering at its own pace. The first attempt at international peace was the League of Nations, followed by the signing of the Kellogg-Briand Pact on August 27, 1928, with the hope of it becoming “a pact to end all wars” (Burrows 108). Recovery was also needed in Japan on September 1, 1923, when an “earthquake all but eradicated Tokyo and the neighbouring port of Yokohama” (Burrows 91). One

Some of the common themes were self-exile, indulgence, spiritual and social alienation, decay, hedonism, nature, and the death of the American Dream, all of which summarized and encompassed the feelings of the Twenties generation (O’Connor). In poetry specifically, nature, the war, and even segregation, as in “Caged Bird” by Maya Angelou, were recurring themes. The most prevalent themes in novels were decadence and gender roles. Decadence can be found in The Great Gatsby and Tales of the Jazz Age, both by F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the theme of gender roles is found in The Sun Also Rises and T. S. Eliot’s poem “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock” (O’Connor). The Lost Generation built their foundation and themes on the new generation, who had “grown up to find all Gods dead, all wars fought, all faiths in man shaken” (Fitzgerald 304). Through their writing, they popularized themes regarding social loss, cynicism, and decadence, marking the Jazz Age as a new literary