Introduction

A cultural overview

Texts, writers and contexts. modernist poetry: French Origins, English settings: Baudelaire, Mallarme and the Georgians; Extended commentary: imagism; Modernist poetry: America, Ireland and England: Stevens, Williams, Yeats and Eliot; Extended commentary: Eliot, The waste land (1922); The origins of the modernist novel: Flaubert, Mann, Kafka and Joyce; Extended commentary: Joyce, A portrait of the artist as a young man (1916); The modernist novel in England: Saki, Woolf and Lawrence; Extended commentary: Lawrence, Women in love (1920); The european stage: Ibsen, Strindberg, Pirandello and Brecht ; Extended commentary: Brecht, Mother courage and her children (1939); The British stage and theatre thinkers: Wilde, Shaw and Beckett; Extended commentary: Beckett, Waiting for Godot

Critical theories and debates. Literature, visual art and music; Modernist print culture; Literature and war; Modernism and its critics

Resources; Timeline; Further reading.