Book Review: Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature

Editors: Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls
Publisher: Cambridge University Press – 885 pages
Book Review by: Sonu Chandiram

This is one of a series of histories of English literature by the Cambridge University Press. In apparent (due to conflicting historical opinions) chronological order, they are listed below. I urge readers to avail themselves of any of the following volumes in the series based on their needs for study and interest:

Cambridge History of Early Medieval English Literature
Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature
Cambridge History Early Modern English Literature
Cambridge History English Literature1660-1780
Cambridge History Victorian English Literature
Cambridge History English Romantic Literature
Cambridge History Twentieth-Century English Literature  

According to an article in Wikipedia, the history of literature in the English language can be more accurately classified in the following chronological order:

• Old English literature (c. 450–1066)
• Middle English literature (1066–1500)
  • 1 Medieval theatre
• English Renaissance (1500–1660)
  • 1 Elizabethan period (1558–1603)
    • 1.1 Poetry
    • 1.2 Drama
  • 2Jacobean period (1603–1625)
    • 2.1 Drama
    • 2.2 Poetry
    • 2.3 Prose
  • 3Late Renaissance (1625–1660)
    • 3.1Poetry
  • Restoration Age (1660–1700)
    • 1 Poetry
    • 2 Prose
    • 3 Drama
  • 18th century
    • 1 Augustan literature (1700–1750)
      • 1.1 Poetry
      • 1.2 Drama
      • 1.3 Prose, including the novel
    • 2 Age of Sensibility (1750–1798)
      • 2.1 Precursors of Romanticism
    • Romanticism (1798–1837)
      • 1 Romantic Poetry
        • 1.1Second generation
        • 1.2 Other poets
      • 2 Romantic Novel
      • 3 Romanticism in America
    • Victorian literature (1837–1901)
      • 1 The Victorian novel
        • 1.1 American novel (From Romanticism to realism)
        • 1.2 Genre fiction
        • 1.3 Children’s literature
      • 2Victorian poetry
        • 2.1American poetry
      • 3 Victorian drama
    • 20th century
      • 1 Modernism (1901–1922)
      • 2 Modernism (1923–1939)
      • 3 Post–modernism (1940–2000)
        • 3.1 The novel
        • 3.2 Drama
        • 3.3 Poetry
        • 3.4 Literature from the Commonwealth of Nations
        • 3.5 American writers
      • 4 Genre fiction in the twentieth-century
      • 5 Literary criticism in the twentieth century

The volume we are reviewing, the Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, is the last of the currently-available Cambridge series on English literature. What is the volume about, and what does it cover?

• It is about the impact of English writing from the former colonies of England on English literature of the period.
• It analyzes the ways in which conventional literary genres were shaped and inflected by the new cultural technologies of cinema, radio and television
• It covers the full range of writing in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales
• In providing the authoritative narrative of literary and cultural production across the country, this volume acknowledges the claims and impact innovation and modernization that characterize the beginning of the twentieth century
• It also acknowledges the more profound patterns of continuity and development that avant-garde tendencies characteristically underplay
• This volume is a major source of information on English literature of the twentieth century, and that literature’s cultural context and relationship to the present twenty-first century.

Editors:

Laura Marcus is Professor of English at the University of Sussex, and co-director of its Center for Modernist Studies. She has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and culture. Her publications include Auto/biographical Discourses: Criticism, Theory, Practice (1994/98) and Virginia Woolf (1997/2004) and as editor, Sigmund Freud’s ‘Interpretation of Dreams’: New Interdisciplinary Essays (1999) and Close Up 1927-33: Cinema and Modernism (1998).

Peter Nicholls is Professor of English and American Literature and co-director of its center for Modernist Studies. He is the editor of Textual Practice. He is the author of Politics, Economics, and Writing: A Study of Ezra Pound’s ‘Cantos’ (1984), Modernisms: A Literary Guide (1985) and of many articles and essays on twentieth-century literature and theory. He has recently co-edited Ruskin and Modernism (2001).