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: 19001929, 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:
Culture (1998)
Literary Elites and Public
Bonnie Kime Scott, The Gender of Modernism, 1990
Tom Stoppard, Travesties (1974)
Dennis Walder, ed., Literature in the Modern World:
Documents, 1990
Critical Essays and
Poetry in the Modern World: general
Clive Bloom and Brian Docherty, American Poetry: The Modernist Ideal, 1995
2
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
3
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
4
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
5
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
..
1996
..
ed., New National and Post-colonial Literatures: An Introduction,
Neil Lazarus, Resistance in Postcolonial African Fiction, 1990
6
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
7
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
8
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