This Cambridge History is the first major history of twentieth-century English literature to cover the full range of writing in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. The volume also explores the impact of writing from the former colonies on English literature of the period and analyses the ways in which conventional literary genres were shaped and inflected by the new cultural technologies of radio, cinema, and television. In providing an authoritative narrative of literary and cultural production across the century, this History acknowledges the claims for innovation and modernization that chracterise the beginning of the period. At the same time, it attends analytically to the more profound patterns of continuity and development which avant-garde tendencies characteristically underplay. Containing all the virtues of a Cambridge History, this new volume is a major event for anyone concerned with twentieth-century literature, its cultural context, and its relation to the contemporary.

‘The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature is an event to be celebrated by modernist and other twentieth-century scholars …individual contributions are, without exception, written with both intelligence and an engaging energy, and many, even most, manage both to present economically what 'everyone knows or else should know' … ‘The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature is then an altogether fitting monument to the literature of the past century, and a rich artifact of modernist and twentieth-century studies …'

Kevin J .H. Dettmar Source: Modernism/Modernity

‘It is one of the great achievements of this volume that the editors have managed to synthesise the period into a coherent history while also giving space to the varied perspectives of their contributors and to the multiple voices of their subjects. As a reference work, it is an essential tool for the undergraduate and taught postgraduate market.'

Jessica Gardner Source: Emerald: Reference Reviews

‘The range is enormous and the contributions from scholars in Britain, Australia, and the U. S. bring their individual insights to bear on the century's literary output and trends. It fully maintains the high standard already set by this series.'

Source: Contemporary Review

'The editors of this volume, the first published literary history of the whole of the twentieth-century, have laid down an authoritative marker against which future histories of the period should be judged. As a reference work, it is an essential tool for the undergraduate and taught postgraduate market.'

Source: Emerald