Pater to Forster, 1873-1924 covers a period often named as an 'age of transition', which exists uneasily between the apparent moral certainties of the Victorian age and the advent of a modernist aesthetics of instability and uncertainty. Ruth Robbins considers some of the central literary categories and themes of the period in writings by major and 'minor' writers - decadence, realism and naturalism, nostalgia, New Woman writing, degeneration, imperialism and early modernism - to create a complex picture of transitions, continuities and breaks with the past.