Most of this seventh volume of The Pelican Guide to English Literature is devoted to essays dealing in detail with such individual writers as Conrad, E. M. Forster, Henry James, W. B. Yeats, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and D. H. Lawrence. There are also more general essays on Shaw and the London Theatre, The Comedy of Ideas, the Literature of the First War World, the Irish Contribution, as well as Poetry and the Novel since the Second World War. In addition there are essays on the Twentieth Century Best-Seller and on Mass Media. Finally, the volume contains an appendix of biographies and bibliographies.

CONTENTS:

PART I – The Social and Intellectual Background
Introduction: The writer’s predicament – Economic and social change – Moral perplexities – The new social ethic – Problems of popular culture – The writer’s response to his age

PART II – The Literary Scene
The opening scene – New influences in fiction – Tradition and experiment in poetry – Poetry and the war crisis – War and crisis in fiction – The search for values in poetry – Values in fiction – Developments in literary criticism – The closing years of an age

PART III
Henry James: The Drama of Discrimination
From Heart of Darkness to Nostromo: An Approach to Conrad
Hardy, de la Mare, and Edward Thomas
The Literature of the First World War
The Later Poetry of W. B. Yeats
The Irish Contribution
Shaw and the London Theatre
The Comedy of Ideas: Cross-Currents in the Fiction and Drama of the Twentieth Century
The Prose of Thought
Mr Forster’s Good Influence
Virginia Woolf: The Theory and Practice of Fiction
L. H. Myers and Bloomsbury
D. H. Lawrence and Women in Love
The Consistency of James Joyce
Ezra Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberley
T. S. Eliot: Poet and Critic
Criticism and the Reading Public
The Poetry of W. H. Auden
Novelists of Three Decades: Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, C. P. Snow
Two Welsh Writers: T. F. Powys and Dylan Thomas
The Twentieth-Century Best-Seller
Mass Communications in Britain
Poetry Today
The Novel Today
Recent English Drama