The Modern Age: The Pelican Guide to English Literature 7

The series of which this volume forms part is not a Bradshaw or a Whitaker's Almanack of information; nor has it been designed on the lines of the standard Histories of Literature. It is intended for those many thousands of general readers who accept with genuine respect what is known as our 'literary heritage', but who might none the less hesitate to describe intimately the work of such writers as Pope, George Eliot, Langland, Marvell, Yeats, Tourneur, Hopkins, Crabbe, or D. H. Lawrence, or to fit them into any larger pattern of growth and development. It is with such readers in mind that this guide to the history and traditions of our literature, this contourmap to the literary scene, has been planned. It attempts to draw up an ordered account ofliterature that is concerned, first and foremost, with value for the present, and this as a direct encouragement to people to read for themselves. Most of this seventh and final volume is devoted to essays dealing in detail with such individual writers as Conrad, E. M. Forster, Henry James, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and D. H. Lawrence. There are also more general essays on Shaw and the London Theatre, The Comedy of Ideas, the Literature of the First World War, the Irish Contribution, as well as Poetry and the Novel since the Second World War. • In addition there are essays on the Twentieth Century Best-Seller and on Mass Media. Finally, the volume contains an Appendix of biographies and bibliographies.