Modernism: A Guide to European Literature,1890-1930

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Malcolm Bradbury, James McFarlane
Penguin Books, 1991 - Literary Criticism - 688 pages
The period 1890-1930 produced literature that still feels contemporary and few movements can boast such an international wealth of innovative writers - Apollinaire, Brecht, Joyce, Kafka, Strindberg, Woolf and Yeats among many others. This now classic survey explores the ideas, the groupings and the social tensions that shaped this transformation, as well as the literature itself, and identifies the elements of shock and crisis central to Modernist style. Appropriately, the contributors display a stimulating variety of critical approaches and methods resulting in some of the most exciting and scholarly criticism yet written on Modernism.

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About the author (1991)

Malcolm Bradbury is a novelist, critic, television dramatist and Emeritus Professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia. He is author of the novels Eating People is Wrong (1959); Stepping Westward (1965); The History Man (1975); which won the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize and was adapted as a famous television series; Rates of Exchange (1983) which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Cuts: A Very Short Novel (1987), also televised; and Doctor Criminale (1992). His critical works include The Modern American Novel (1984; revised edition, 1992); No, Not Bloomsbury (essays, 1987); The Modern world: Ten Great Writers (1988); From Puritanism to Post-modernism: A History of American Literature (with Richard Ruland, 1991) He is the author of a collection of seven stories and nine parodies, entitled Who Do You Think You Are? (1976), and of several works of humour and satire, including Why Come to Slaka? (1986), Unsent Letters (1988; revised edition, 1995) and Mensonge (1987). Many of his books are published by Penguin. In addition, he has written many television plays and the television 'novel' The Gravy Train and The Gravy Train Goes East. He has adapted several television series, including Tom Sharpe's Porterhouse Blue, Kinglsey Amis's The Green Man and Stella Gibbon's' Cold Comfort Farm, now a feature film.

Malcolm Bradbury lives in Norwich, travels good deal, and in 1991 he was awarded the CBE.

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