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.

Andrzej Gasiorek is Professor of Twentieth–Century Literature at the University of Birmingham. He is the author of Postwar British Fiction: Realism and After (1995), Wyndham Lewis and Modernism (2003), and J. G. Ballard (2005) and the co–editor of T. E. Hulme and the Question of Modernism (2006), Ford Madox Ford: Literary Networks and Cultural Transformations (2008), The Oxford History of the Novel in English Vol. 4: The Reinvention of the British and Irish Novel 1880–1940 (2010), The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms (2010), and Wyndham Lewis and the Cultures of Modernity (2011). He is also co–editor of the journal Modernist Cultures and editor of the Journal of Wyndham Lewis Studies .