York Notes Companions: Modernist Literature

Dr Gary Day is Principal Lecturer and English Course leader for the MA in Independent Study at the University of De Montfort. He has a wide range of literary interests, including modern literature and drama, and the history of criticism. He is also widely published, with his most recent work, Literary Criticism: A New History (Edinburgh University Press, 2008), described as ‘exuberantly readable … a book that will appeal to students and scholars alike’. He is also the author of Class (Routledge 2001) described by Terry Eagleton as ‘a signal achievement’. In addition to being the author of several other books and of many chapters, essays and articles he has also edited Palgrave’s New Casebook on The Rainbow and Women in Love (Macmillan, 2004), British Poetry 1990–1950 (Macmillan, 1995), and Literature and Culture in Modern Britain Volumes 2 and 3 (Longman, 1997, 1999). He is a reviewer for, amongst others, THES, the Journal of Eighteenth Century Studies and the TLS. Gary Day is joint editor with Jack Lynch of the Wiley Encyclopedia of Eighteenth Century Literature.

• Part One: Introduction  Part Two: A Cultural Overview  Part Three: Texts, Writers and Contexts   Modernist poetry –  French Origins, English Settings: Baudelaire, Mallarmé and the Georgianso       Extended commentary: Imagism   Modernist poetry – America, Ireland and England: Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Yeats and Elioto       Extended commentary: T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land (1922)  ·        The Modernist novel and tradition: Flaubert, Mann, Kafka and Joyce Extended commentary: Joyce, The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) ·        The Modernist novel II: Saki, Woolf and Lawrence Extended commentary: Lawrence, Women in Love (1920)   The Modernist play I – Ibsen, Strindberg, Pirandello and Beckett Extended commentary: Beckett,Endgame (1957)   The Modernist play II – Conrad, Brecht and Artaudo       Extended commentary: Brecht, Baal (1923)  Part Four:  Critical theories and Debates  Literature and War  Modernist Print Culture  Modernism, Music the Visual Arts  Modernism and its Critics    Part Five: Resources  Timeline  Further reading  Index

"Via a combination of critical approaches and textual analysis, Day explores a fertile period for literary development."- Reviewed in Times Higher Education