Ebook: Twentieth-Century English Literature

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 Professor of English at the University of Sussex, and co-director of its Centre for Modernist Studies. She has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture. Her publications include Auto/biographical Discourses: Criticism, Theory, Practice (1994/8) and Virginia Woolf (1997/2004), and, as editor, Sigmund Freud’s ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’: New Interdisciplinary Essays (1999) and Close Up 1927–33: Cinema and Modernism (1998). Peter Nicholls is Professor of English and American Literature at the University of Sussex, and co-director of its Centre for Modernist Studies. He is the editor of Textual Practice. He is the author of Politics, Economics and Writing: A Study of Ezra Pound’s ‘Cantos’ (1984), Modernisms: A Literary Guide (1995) and of many articles and essays on twentieth-century literature and theory. He has recently co-edited Ruskin and Modernism (2001).

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