In this lucid book a distinguished scholar and critic measures British fiction from World War I through the convulsive effects of the Depression and World War II, and the importance of the writing that has been done since Finnegan's Wake.

Webster presents a moving account of the shattering impact of the Great War upon British writers, particularly Rose Macaulay, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, and Ivy Compton-Burnett. The cynicism and despair which afflicted them also bore heavily on the novelists of the thirties and forties -- Graham Greene, Joyce Cary, L. P. Hartley, C. P. Snow, who...