LITERATURE IN THE MODERN WORLD



LITERATURE IN THE MODERN WORLD

READING LIST: Literary history, biography and criticism

What follow are details of books and articles which tutors teaching the module have themselves found useful. The list is arranged in the order in which topics come up on the syllabus, and is particularly meant to help when you are preparing for assessed essays and the exam. It is confined to ‘secondary’ material – work about the authors and topics, rather than by the set authors themselves. Often, though, in fact, the best approach to a particular work or genre is to read more ‘primary’ material - something else by the same writer, or of a similar kind.

Other background material can be found on the Web – and, of course, on the shelves of the university library.

Section 1: Poetry and Fiction in the Modern World

Literary Modernity and Modernism: background

Michael Bell, Literature, Modernism and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the Twentieth Century (1997)

Clive Bloom, ed., Literature and Culture in Modern Britain, volume 1: 1900-1929, 1993 [esp. the Introduction]

Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, eds., Modernism (1976)

John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (1992)

Lawrence Rainey, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture (1998)

Bonnie Kime Scott, The Gender of Modernism, 1990

Tom Stoppard, Travesties (1974)

Dennis Walder, ed., Literature in the Modern World: Critical Essays and Documents, 1990

Poetry in the Modern World: general

Clive Bloom and Brian Docherty, American Poetry: The Modernist Ideal, 1995

Donald Davie, Articulate Energy, 1958

Michael Hamburger, The Truth of Poetry: Tensions in Modern Poetry from Baudelaire to the 1960s, 1969

Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era, 1972

W.B.Yeats

Richard Ellmann, Yeats: the Man and the Masks, 1979

Roy Foster, W.B.Yeats: A Life, , vol 1. The Apprentice Mage, 1997; vol. 2, The Arch-Poet, 2003

A.Norman Jeffares, A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W.B.Yeats, 1968

Edward Larrissy, Yeats the Poet, 1994

David Pierce, Yeats’s Worlds: Ireland, England and the Poetic Imagination, 1995

Stan Smith, Yeats: A Critical Introduction, 1990

John Unterecker, A Reader’s Guide to W.B.Yeats, 1959

T.S.Eliot

Michael Edwards, Towards a Christian Poetics, 1984, chapter entitled ‘Eliot / Language’

Cleo McNelly Kearns, T. S. Eliot and Indic Traditions: A Study in Poetry and Belief, 1987 [esp. section on ‘Metaphysics in The Waste Land’, p 195f.]

High Kenner, The Invisible Poet: T.S.Eliot, 1959

Nick Selby, ed., T.S.Eliot: ‘The Waste Land’ (Icon Critical; Guides), 2000

B.C.Southam, A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S.Eliot, 1968

George Williamson, A Reader’s Guide to T.S.Eliot, 1955

William Carlos Williams

Steve Axelrod and Helen Deese, eds., Critical Essays on William Carlos Williams, 1995

Harold Bloom, ed., William Carlos Williams, 1986

Charles Doyle, ed., William Carlos Williams, The Critical Heritage, 1980

Mike Weaver, William Carlos Williams: the American Background, 1971

Fiction in the Modern World: general

Walter Allen, Tradition and Dream: The English and American Novel from the Twenties, 1964

Malcolm Bradbury, Possibilities: Essays on the State of the Novel, 1973

David Daiches, The Novel and the Modern World, 1960

David Lodge, Language of Fiction, 1966

James Joyce

James Baker and Thomas F. Staley, eds., ‘Dubliners’: A Critical Handbook, 1969

Morris Beja, ed., ‘Dubliners’ and ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’: A Casebook, 1973

Vincent Cheng, Joyce, Race and Empire, 1995

Richard Ellmann, James Joyce, 1959

Peter Garrett, ed., Twentieth Century Interpretations of ‘Dubliners’: A Collection of Critical Essays, 1968

John Gross, Joyce (Fontana Modern Masters Series), 1971

Hugh Kenner, Dublin’s Joyce, 1969

Robert Spoo, James Joyce and the Language of History, 1994

Franz Kafka

Jeremy Adler, Franz Kafka, 2001

Harold Bloom ed., Franz Kafka's 'The Trial': Modern Critical Interpretations, 1987

R.Gray, ed., Kafka: A Collection of Critical Essays, 1962

Erich Heller, Kafka 1974

Julian Preece, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Kafka, 2002 [see esp. Rolf J. Goebel’s article, ‘The Exploration of the Modern City in The Trial’]

Ritchie Robertson, Kafka: Judaism, Politics, and Literature, 1985

A. K. Thorlby, A Student's Guide to Kafka, 1972

Virginia Woolf

Rachel Bowlby, Feminist Destinations and further essays on Virginia Woolf, 1997

Jane Goldman, ed., Virginia Woolf: ‘To the Lighthouse’, ‘The Waves’ (Icon Critical Guides), 1997

Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf, 1996

Jane Marcus, ed., New Feminist Essays on Virginia Woolf, 1981

Toril Moi, 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?', in Sexual / Textual Politics, 1985

Sue Reid, ed., ‘Mrs Dalloway’ and ‘To the Lighthouse’: Contemporary Critical Essays, 1993

Sue Roe and Susan Sellers, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf, 2000

Henry Green

Rod Mengham, The Idiom of the Time: The Writings of Henry Green, 1982

Jeremy Treglown, Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green, 2000

Section 2: Second World War to Postcolonialism

Writing about War

Bernard Bergonzi, Wartime and Aftermath: English Literature and its Background, 1939-1960, 1993

Paul Fussell, Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War, 1989

Jenny Hartley, ed., Hearts Undefeated: Women’s Writing of the Second World War, 1994

Samuel Hynes, The Soldier’s Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War, 1997

Gill Plain, Women’s Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power and Resistance, 1996

The 1950s and 60s

Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, 1987

Robert Hewison, In Anger: Culture in the Cold War, 1945-60, 1981

.. .. Too Much: Art and Society 1960-75, 1986

Arthur Marwick, The Sixties, Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and the United States, c. 1958-c.1974, 1998.

Blake Morrison, The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s, 1980

Alan Sinfield, Literature, Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain, 1989

National and Postcolonial Themes

Rosemary Marangoly George, The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction, 1996

Bruce King, The New English Literatures: Cultural Nationalism in a Changing World, 1980

.. .. ed., New National and Post-colonial Literatures: An Introduction, 1996

Neil Lazarus, Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction, 1990

Pericles Lewis, Modernism, Nationalism, and the Novel, 2000

Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 1993

Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature, 1986

George Orwell

Bernard Crick, George Orwell: A Life, 1980

Christopher Hitchens, Orwell’s Victory, 2003

Jeffrey Myers, ed., Orwell: The Critical Heritage, 1975

Raymond Williams, Orwell, 1991

Alok Rai, Orwell and the Politics of Despair, 1988

Peter Stansky & William Abrahams, The Unknown Orwell, 1972

Elizabeth Bowen

Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel, 1995

Heather Bryant Jordan, How Will the Heart Endure: Elizabeth Bowen and the Landscape of War, 1995

Victoria Glendinning, Elizabeth Bowen: Portrait of a Writer, 1977

Heather Bryant Jordan, How Will the Heart Endure: Elizabeth Bowen and the Landscape of War, 1992

Phyllis Lassner, Women Writers: Elizabeth Bowen, 1990

Hermione Lee, Elizabeth Bowen: An estimation, 1981

Primo Levi

Carole Angier, The Double Bond: Primo Levi – A Biography, 2002

S.Kremer, Memory and mastery: Primo Levi as writer and witness, 2001

Jay Losely, ‘From savage elements: Epiphany in Primo Levi’s holocaust writings’, Journal of European Studies, March, 1994, 1-21

Risa Sodi, A Dante of Our Time: Primo Levi and Auschwitz, 1990

- - ‘An Interview with Primo Levi’, Partisan Review, Summer 1987

Anthony Rudolf, At an Uncertain Hour: Primo Levi’s war against oblivion, 1990

Rupert Thomson, Primo Levi, 2002

Samuel Beckett

John Pilling (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Samuel Beckett (Cambridge: CUP, 1994)

John Fletcher, Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape (London: Faber, 2000)

David Bradby, Beckett, Waiting for Godot (Cambridge: CUP, 2001)

Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett: A Reader’s Guide (NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux; London: Thames & Hudson 1973)

James Knowlson and John Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and Drama of Samuel Beckett (London: John Calder, 1979)

Sylvia Plath

Claire Brennan, The Poetry of Sylvia Plath (Icon Critical Guides), 2000

Christina Britzolakis, Sylvia Plath and the Theatre of Mourning, 1999

Lynda K. Bundtzen, Plaths Incarnations: Women and the Creative Process, 1983

Gary Lane, ed., Sylvia Plath: New Views on the Poetry, 1979

Annette Lavers, ‘The World as Icon’, in The Art of Sylvia Plath, ed. Charles Newman, 1970

Linda Wagner, ed., Sylvia Plath: The Critical Heritage, 1988

Fionn MacColla

Cairns Craig, The modern Scottish novel: narrative and the national imagination,1999

Marshall Walker, Scottish literature since 1707, 1996

Additional material is available in SRC.

Ngugi wa Thiong’o

James Ogude, Ngugi’s Novels and African History: Narrating the Nation, 1999

Michael Parker and Rogers Starkey, ed., Postcolonial Literatures: Achebe, Ngugi, Desai, Walcott, 1995

Patrick Williams, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, 1999

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