How did World War I change the work of Anglo-American Modernist writers?

World War I served as a profound turning point for Anglo-American Modernist literature. While the movement began with prewar experimentation, the unprecedented scale of destruction and slaughter during the war undermined faith in Western culture and society, shifting the literary focus toward themes of disillusionment and fragmentation.12

The war effectively ended the initial, more utopian phase of the Modernist revolution. Writers became acutely aware of the gulf between their artistic ideals and the chaos of the postwar world. Consequently, many authors began to parody traditional forms and styles, viewing them as redundant in the face of such horror. This era gave rise to the Lost Generation, a group of writers whose work—such as that of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald—articulated a deep sense of postwar alienation.34

Postwar works, most notably T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, utilized fragmented narratives and obscure allusions to reflect a sterile, spiritually empty landscape, demanding that readers take an active role in interpreting these complex, broken texts.12