What does alienation in modern and contemporary literature mean?
Alienation refers to the phenomenon in contemporary literature where the original natural, cultural, and social attributes of the human subject are distorted, weakened, or lost in the process of interaction with the social environment, resulting in the separation of individuals from society. Alienation was usually manifested as an individual losing their sense of self, losing contact with society, or being oppressed and enslaved by society. Alienation is very common in contemporary literature. For example, in modernist literature, individual loneliness, psychological contradictions and self-exploration become the main theme; in post-modernist literature, social structure, cultural system, historical tradition and so on become the object of literary research; in realist literature, the influence of social environment and interpersonal relationships on individuals is also widely discussed.
