A History of Modernist Literature - 9781405177160

"Andrzei Gasiorek's A History of Modernist Literature is a major achievement. The author manages never to oversimplify the range of responses of modernism even within the works of individual authors, and he shows magisterial range over both chronology and the various critical currents in modernist studies over the last decades. Form and context are always in dialog here. A History of Modernist Literature is a landmark work. I suspect it will become a standard history of its field, and it demonstrates an impressive blend of synthesis and reconfiguration of often ambiguous and even self-contradictory ideas about authors and events of the period."

Scott Klein, Wake Forest University

"This is a very impressive undertaking, both intellectually and in the range of its contents. I can think of no other book that covers this wide terrain so expertly. With verve, clarity and a wealth of evidence, Andrze Gasiorek guides the reader through a series of complex issues, mapping the field of relationships and positions as he proceeds. The prose style is faultless. The commentary on individual texts, on broader tendencies, and on the character and direction of the period is skilful, scholarly, and of a very high order throughout."

Peter Brooker, University of Nottingham

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 contributions 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.