Note: Each section is arranged alphabetically. Place of publication is London unless otherwise stated.
Dangerfield, G. The Strange Death of Liberal England (1936). (Elegant account of the period 1910–14.)
Graves, R. and Hodge, A. The Long Weekend: A Social History of Great Britain 1918–1935 (1940). (Entertaining. Robert Graves does not know how to be dull.)
Hynes, S. The Edwardian Turn of Mind (1968).
Lewis, J. Women in England, 1870–1950: Sexual Divisions and Social Change (1984).
Marwick, A. Britain in the Century of Total War: War, Peace and Change, 1900–1967 (1968). (Lively radical textbook.)
Pugh, M. The Making of Modern British Politics, 1867–1939 (Oxford, 1982). (Detailed and sophisticated.)
Shannon, R. The Crisis of Imperialism, 1865–1915 (1974). (Readable account of the late Victorian period.)
Stevenson, J. British Society, 1914—45 (1984).
Taylor, A. J. P. English History, 1914–45 (Oxford, 1965). (Enjoyable, provocative, sometimes debatable.)
Wiener, M. J. English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850–1980 (Cambridge, 1981).
Altick, R. D. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (1957). (Though dealing mostly with an earlier period, it is invaluable in preventing easy generalizations about the twentieth century.)
Bullock, A. and Stallybrass, O., The Fontana Dictionary of Modern Thought (1977). (Entries eds on men, technical terms, catchwords, etc. Comprehensive on the received wisdom of its time.)
Eliot, T. S. Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948). (For good and ill an illuminating exposition of Eliot’s high conservative line of argument.)
Gross, J. The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters: Aspects of English Literary Life Since 1800 (1969).
Hoggart, R. The Uses of Literacy (1957). (On popular culture and the mass media.)
Leavis, F. R. Mass Civilization and Minority Culture (Cambridge, 1930). (A book whose title sums up an attitude which has been much adopted.)
Leavis, Q. D. Fiction and the Reading Public (1932). (An early discussion of best sellers and their public.)
Moore, G. E. Principia Ethica (1903). (An attempt to propound a rational theory of ethics; the holy book of the Bloomsbury Group.)
Richards, I. A. Principles of Literary Criticism (1924). (This, together with Richards’s 1929 Practical Criticism and Empson’s 1930 Seven Types of Ambiguity changed the face of literary criticism in English.)
Williams, R. Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (1958). (Discusses the political and social bases for ideas of culture.)
Wintle, J., ed. Makers of Modern Culture (1981). (Excellent biographical entries for over 500 figures in all fields of cultural activity - literary, scientific, musical, sociological, etc.)
Allen, W. The English Novel (1954). (A sound and balanced general survey.)
Allott, M. Novelists on the Novel (1959). (A discussion of fictional technique on the basis of extensive comments by novelists.)
Auerbach, E. Mimesis (trans. by Trask, W., Princeton, 1953). (On the concept of ‘realism’ at different times; better on general ideas than in criticism of individual writers.)
Booth, W. C. The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, 1961). (Important study which, among other things, asserts the right of the author to tell as well as show.)
Culler, J. Structuralist Poetics (1975). (Contains a section on fiction.)
Docherty, T. Reading (Absent) Character: Towards a Theory of Characterization in Fiction (1983). (Opposes traditional mimetic view of character. More readable than most comparable works.)
Ford, F. M. The English Novel from the Earliest Days to the Death of Joseph Conrad (Philadelphia, 1929). (To be read as much for a sense of Ford Madox Ford’s enthusiasm as for its informative value.)
Forster, E. M. Aspects of the Novel (1927). (Throws light on Forster’s own fiction, but contains other shrewd points.)
Friedman, A. J. and Donley, C. C. Einstein as Myth and Muse (Cambridge, 1985). (Discusses what influence Einstein may be thought to have on literature. Bibliography.)
Frye, N. Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957). (An exercise in classifying different kinds of fiction; provocative of much debate.)
Halperin, J., ed. The Theory of the Novel (1974). (A collection of essays on such issues as realism, point of view, and authorial intention.)
Hardy, B. The Appropriate Form (1964). (Emphasizes the variety of narrative forms and argues against a reductively ‘Jamesian’ view.)
Harvey, W. J. Character and the Novel (1965). (Excellent discussion.)
Hazell, S., ed. The English Novel: Developments in Criticism Since Henry James (1978). (In the ‘Casebook’ series; a useful collection of varied essays.)
Hewitt, D. J. The Approach to Fiction: Good and Bad Readings of Novels (1972). (Discusses the different kinds of novels and the need for different critical approaches.)
Hirsch, E. D. Validity in Interpretation (1967). (Reaffirms the validity of authorial intention.)
Kermode, J. F. The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York, 1967). (Short, stimulating.)
———Essays on Fiction: 1971–82 (1983). (Engages with structuralist criticism, deconstruction, etc.)
Lodge, D. Language of Fiction: Essays in Criticism and Verbal Analysis of the English Novel (1966). (An attempt to reconcile modern linguistic theories with traditional criticism.)
Mack, M. and Gregor, I, eds Imagined Worlds: Essays on some English Novels and Novelists (1968). (A very varied collection, covering a wide area; useful essays on Conrad, Lawrence, Joyce, and Waugh.)
Mendilow, A. A. Time and the Novel (1952). (An excellent and exhaustive study of the novelist’s and the reader’s dealing with time.)
O’Connor, F. The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (1964). (By a distinguished practitioner.)
Shaw, V. The Short Story: A Critical Introduction (1983). (Sensible, modest but firm in its claims for the short story as a significant genre. Deals with wide international variety, but sections on James, Lawrence, Kipling, Mansfield.)
Stevick, P., ed. The Theory of the Novel (New York, 1967). (Anthology of statements from critics and novelists on narrative techniques, character, point of view etc.)
Swinden, P. Unofficial Selves: Character in the Novel from Dickens to the Present Day (1973). (Discusses various conventions within which characters can be conceived; sections on Ford, Bennett, and Lawrence.)
Williams, R. The English Novel from Dickens to Lawrence (1970). (Relates the novel to social changes.)
Bergonzi. B. Reading the Thirties: Texts and Contexts (1978). (Discusses the response of the ‘Auden generation’ to economic and political crises.)
———The Myth of Modernism and Twentieth-Century Literature (1985).
Bradbury, M. The Social Context of Modern English Literature (Oxford, 1971). (Discusses the concept of‘Modernism’, the relationship between high and low culture, etc.)
Bradbury, M. and Palmer, D., eds Contemporary Criticism (1970). (Anthology of modern critical theories.)
Donoghue, D. The Ordinary Universe: Soundings in Modern Literature (1968). (Tries to redeem the ordinary from the assumptions of the extreme.)
Ellmann, R. and Feidelson, C., eds The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature (1965). (A thorough study of such issues as realism and symbolism)
Faulkner, P., ed. A Modernist Reader, Modernism in England, 1910–1980 (1986). (A useful collection of proclamations and critical statements. Good bibliography.)
Fussell, P. The Great War and Modern Memory (1975). (A study of how the war has entered not only literature but also mythology and everyday speech.)
Gillie, C. Movements in English Literature, 1900–1940 (Cambridge, 1975). (A general survey which aims to distinguish patterns.)
Hamilton, I. The Little Magazines: A Study of Six Editors (1976). (On The Little Review, Poetry, Partisan Review, New Verse, Criterion and Horizon.)
Harrison, J. R. The Reactionaries (1966). (A study of the ‘anti-democratic intelligentsia’, notably Yeats, Pound, Lewis, Eliot, and Lawrence.)
Holland, N. The Dynamics of Literary Response (1969). (Sophisticated Freudian approach.)
Hough, G. Image and Experience: Studies in a Literary Revolution (1960). (A discussion of the literary ‘revolution’ which Hough locates in the 1920s; emphasis on its international nature.)
Hynes, S. Edwardian Occasions: Essays on English Writing in the Early Twentieth Century (1972). (A bit of a hotchpotch but readable on various issues. Some discussion of minor figures.)
Kumar, K. Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times (Oxford, 1986).
Lodge, D., ed. Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism (1972). (On fiction contains a number of important essays and extracts. In general provides a good account of critical discussion up to the mid 1960s.)
Lucas, J., ed. The 1930s: A Challenge to Orthodoxy (1978). (Basically Marxist challenge to received wisdom, with emphasis on working-class writers.)
Trilling, L. The Liberal Imagination (1943.) (A wide range of topics; interesting on influence of Freud on critical thinking.)
Wilson, E. AxeVs Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930 (New York, 1931). (All later writers on this subject must be indebted to this seminal work.)
Wright, A. Literature of Crisis, 1910–22 (1984). (Discusses Howards End, Heartbreak House, The Waste Land, and Women in Love.)
Alcorn, J. The Nature Novel from Hardy to Lawrence (New York, 1977). (Suggests that Hardy places his novel in the context of a natural world and that this liberating force can be distinguished in later writers.)
Batchelor, J. The Edwardian Novelists (1982). (A discussion of what is shared in the outlook of such varied writers as Conrad, Ford, Wells, Bennett, Galsworthy, and Forster.)
Buckley, J. H. Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding (Cambridge, Mass., 1974). (Sensible and lucid; includes sections on Joyce, Lawrence, Wells, and Hardy.)
Coveney, P. The Image of Childhood (1967). (Originally pub. 1957 as Poor Monkey: The Child in Literature. Sections on Joyce, Woolf, and Lawrence.)
Daiches, D. The Novel and the Modern World (Chicago, 1939). (Revised edn 1965. Discusses the social implications of a number of writers.)
Edel, L. The Modern Psychological Novel (New York, 1964). (Short introduction.)
Friedman, M. J. Stream of Consciousness: A Study in Literary Method (New Haven, 1955).
Goonetilleke, D. C. R. A. Images of the Raj: South Asia in the Literature of Empire (1986). (A sober account by a critic who takes a hard look at imperialism.)
Gregor, I. and Nicholas, B. The Moral and the Story (1962). (Discussion of narrative, including sections on Lawrence and Greene.)
Hawthorne, J. The British Working-Class Novel in the Twentieth Century (1984). (Sections on Tressell, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, and Lawrence.)
Howe, I. Politics and the Novel (New York, 1957). (Sections on Conrad and Orwell.)
Humphrey, R. Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel (Berkeley, 1954). (Short and accessible.)
Isaacs, J. The Assessment of Twentieth-Century Literature (1951). (Popular account of ‘Modernism’ in the 1920s.)
Josipovici, J., ed. The Modern English Novel: The Reader, The Writer, and the Work (1976). (Miscellaneous essays, mostly emphasizing novels considered as constructions rather than mimetically.)
Kettle, A. An Introduction to the English Novel; vol. II: Henry James to the Present Day (1953). (Intelligent Marxist interpretations.)
Leavis, F. R. The Great Tradition: George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad (1948). (Better on Eliot and James than on Conrad.)
McCormick, J. Catastrophe and Imagination: An Interpretation of the Recent English and American Novel (1957).
Meyers, J. Homosexuality and Literature, 1890–1930 (1977). (A study of the prevalence of homosexuality in the writers of this period. Some interesting points, but rather too pedestrian.)
Miller, J. H. Fiction and Repetition (1982). (Wrestles with deconstruction in a discussion of Conrad, Hardy, and Woolf.)
O’Connor, F. The Mirror in the Roadway (1957). (A shrewd study of modern fiction by a practitioner.)
O’Connor, W. V., ed. Forms of Modern Fiction (Minneapolis, 1948). (Includes sections on Joyce, Lawrence, Conrad, and Huxley and Mark Schorer’s celebrated essay ‘Technique as Discovery’.)
O’Faolain, S. The Vanishing Hero (1956). (Comments by a short-story writer on this topic from Joyce to Waugh.)
Sandison, A. The Wheel of Empire (1967). (Subtitled: ‘A study of the imperial idea in some late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century fiction’, it deals with Kipling, Conrad, Rider Haggard, and Buchan.)
Savage, D. S. The Withered Branch: Six Studies in the Modern Novel (1950). (An interesting attack by an opponent of the orthodoxy of ‘Modernism’.)
Stewart, J. I. M. Eight Modern Writers (1963). (The novelists are Hardy, James, Conrad, Kipling, Joyce, and Lawrence.)
Street, B. V. The Savage in Literature: Representations of ‘Primitive’ Society in English Fiction, 1858-1920 (1975). (A meeting between literary criticism and social anthropology. Most enlightening on the bad writers.)
Stubbs, P. Women and Fiction: Feminism and the Novel 1880–1920 (1979). (Discusses the relationship between social reality and the fictional presentation of women.)
Turner, E. S. Boys Will Be Boys (1953). (On penny dreadfuls, comics, etc.)
Usborne, R. Clubland Heroes (1953). On the heroes of the thrillers of the 1930s.)
Van Ghent, D. The English Novel: Form and Function (New York, 1953). (Discusses Conrad, Lawrence, and Joyce.)
Williams, R. The Country and the City (1973). (Dissects the myth of the golden age. Useful on Hardy and Lawrence.)
Winks, R. W., ed. Detective Fiction in English, 1840–1979 (1980). (Miscellaneous essays in the series ‘Twentieth-Century Views’.)
Bateson, F. W. and Meserole, H. T., eds A Guide to English and American Literature (1965; variouseditions thereafter). (Packed with information about general criticism, author bibliographies, editions, and critical studies. Lively judgements. The concentration obliges the contributors often to mention a critic’s name but not the title of his/her book, so that it should be used in parallel with such a volume as the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature.)
Blamires, H. and others A Guide to Twentieth-Century Literature in English (1983). (Reliable and readable entries on authors and main texts.)
Watson, G., ed. The Concise Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, 600–1950 (Cambridge, 1958; revised 1965). (Too concise to be more than a quick way of checking dates of main works, etc. but useful for that.)
Watson, G., ed. The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature; vol. Ill: 1800–1900 (Cambridge, 1969).
Willison, I. R., ed. The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature; vol. IV: 1900–1950 (Cambridge, 1972). (The most complete bibliography covering all aspects of literature, including minor ones. It can be confusingly comprehensive but is indispensable.)