The English literature of the 1920s is commonly treated in terms of its position within European or Anglo-American Modernism. This book argues that the English Literature of the period can be better understood when it is examined in the context of a more local social and literary history. Focusing principally on the novel, it sets modernist works alongside non-modernist and popular forms, looking at the engagement of these texts with social concerns, including sexuality, gender and class politics, Englishness, empire and the cultural pessimism which informed the formation of English as a...

This short introduction to Modernism analyses the movement from the perspective of English and American literature.

• Provides a critical overview of some of the central texts of literary Modernism.
  
• Covers both established works and those that have only recently come to critical attention.
  
• Includes detailed discussion of major authors, including T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, Wallace Stevens and H.D.