The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature

Description

This new Cambridge History is the first major history of twentieth-century English literature to cover the full range of writing in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. The volume also explores the impact of writing from the former colonies on English literature of the period and analyses the ways in which conventional literary genres were shaped and inflected by the new cultural technologies of radio, cinema and television. In providing an authoritative narrative of literary and cultural production across the century, this History acknowledges the claims for innovation and modernisation that characterise the beginning of the period. At the same time, it attends analytically to the more profound patterns of continuity and development which avant-garde tendencies characteristically underplay. Containing all the virtues of a Cambridge History, this new volume is a major event for anyone concerned with twentieth-century literature, its cultural context and its relation to the contemporary.

Laura Marcus is Reader in English at the University of Sussex. Peter Nicholls is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Sussex.

'To read it is to feel an irresistible pull towards the classroom. The editors are long-serving professors of literature at Sussex and there is a strong sense of that university's pedagogic idealism, as formulated in the early 1960s by the new university's founders, David Daiches and Asa Briggs. It is an impressive monument to a distinctive style of British scholarship.' Times Literary Supplement 'The editors of this volume, the first published literary history of the whole of the twentieth-century, have laid down an authoritative marker against which future histories of the period should be judged. As a reference work, it is an essential tool for the undergraduate and taught postgraduate market.' Emerald 'The range is enormous and the contributions from scholars in Britain, Australia and the U. S. bring their individual insights to bear on the century's literary output and trends. It fully maintains the high standard already set by this series.' Contemporary Review 'The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature is an event to be celebrated by modernist and other twentieth-century scholar ...individual contributions are, without exception, written with both intelligence and an engaging energy, and many, even most, manage both to present economically what 'everyone knows or else should know' ... The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature is then an altogether fitting monument to the literature of the past century, and a rich artefact of modernist and twentieth-century studies...' Kevin J. H. Dettmar, Southern Illinois University Carbondale