Aestheticism and Modernism : Debating Twentieth-Century Literature 1900–1960

This wide-ranging textbook covers the early twentieth- century to the array of modernisms emerging between the First and Second World Wars.

It is suitable for use as the first part of a twentieth-century literature course, and also as a companion to courses on modernist literature and culture.

The editors introduce twentieth-century debates around genre, form and content reflected in literary and critical writing of the period, as well as differing accounts of the function of literature (aestheticist vs. didactic). They go on to examine debates surrounding modernisms, and the various ways in which authors negotiated the departure of the modern from the past in terms of style, form, ideas and ideology.

Texts examined in detail include: Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard , Mansfield's Short Stories , poetry of the 1930s, Gibbon's Sunset Song , Eliot's Prufrock , Brecht's Galileo , Woolf's Orlando and Okigbo's Selected Poems .