A History of Modernist Literature

A History of Modernist Literature offers a critical overview of modernism in England from the 1890s to the Second World War. From the New Woman writers and Ford Madox Ford’s The English Review to seminal works such as BLAST, Ulysses and The Waste Land, it focuses on the writers, texts, and movements that were especially significant in the development of this transatlantic phenomenon. In addition to the contribution  individual writers made to modernism, the book also explores the intellectual debates, networks and communities that facilitated the creation of key literary works.

The book is chronologically organized, spanning early modernism, the period 1910-1914, modernism during wartime, the years 1918-1930, and modernism in the 1930s, and it concludes with a brief exploration of modernism’s afterlives in the post-1945 period. At once a comprehensive survey, and a detailed critical account of modernism as it developed and changed over this forty-year span, A History of Modernist Literature is essential reading for anyone in the fields of modernism and early twentieth-century English literature.