This volume of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, first published in 2000, provides a thorough account of the critical tradition emerging with the modernist and avant-garde writers of the early twentieth century (Eliot, Pound, Stein, Yeats), continuing with the New Critics (Richards, Empson, Burke, Winters), and feeding into the influential work of Leavis, Trilling and others who helped form the modern institutions of literary culture. The core period covered is 1910–60, but explicit connections are made with nineteenth-century traditions and there is discussion of the implications of modernism and the New Criticism for our own time, with its inherited formalism, anti-sentimentalism, and astringency of tone. The book provides a companion to the other twentieth-century volumes of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, and offers a systematic and stimulating coverage of the development of the key literary-critical movements, with chapters on groups and genres as well as on individual critics.

'This informative volume shows that both modernism and New Criticism may complement 'theory' in letting texts speak without an imperious airing of the volume's own preoccupations.'

Source: The Times Higher Education Supplement

‘Its twenty chapters, written by a distinguished team of contributors, cover most of the peaks and a few of the valleys of Anglo-American criticism between, approximately, 1910 and 1960 … This volume provides some wonderful instances of what being 'intelligent' about literature can be like.'

Source: The Times Literary Supplement