The period 1890 -1930 produced literature that still feels contemporary and few movements can boast such an international wealth of innovative writers - Apollinaire, Brecht, Joyce, Kafka, Strindberg, Woolf and Yeats among many others. "The Modern movement in the arts transformed consciousness and artistic form just as the energies of modernity - scientific, technological, philosophical, political - transformed for ever the nature, the speed, the sensation of human life," write the editors in their new Preface.
This now classic survey explores the ideas, the groupings and the social tensions that shaped this transformation, as well as the literature itself, and identifies the elements of shock and crisis central to Modernist style. Appropriately, the contributors display a stimulating variety of critical approaches and methods resulting in some of the most exciting and scholarly criticism yet written on Modernism.