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'Franco Marucci's History of English Literature is unique in its
field. There is no other book that combines such erudition and authority
in such a compact format. An indispensable work of reference.'
-- J. B. Bullen, Visiting Fellow, Kellogg College, Oxford
History of English Literature is a comprehensive, eight-volume survey
of English literature from the Middle Ages to the early twenty-first
century. This reference work provides insightful and often revisionary
readings of core texts in the English literary canon. Richly informative
analyses are framed by the biographical, historical and intellectual
context for each author.
Volume 7 is dedicated to the four main figures of English Modernism. It
opens by discussing 'interstitial' novelists, such as Galsworthy,
Bennett, Wells and Forster; essayists like Chesterton; and the war
poets. The study then turns to a close analysis of the key writers of
the period: T. S. Eliot is looking for 'roots' and the anchors for a
modern society facing dissolution; D. H. Lawrence is the exponent of a
Modernism of contents rather than of forms, which undermines the
aesthetics of the movement; Joyce is the builder of a 'palace of art',
with an archetypal plot each time updated and stylistically more
refined; and Virginia Woolf is, finally, the writer who pursues the
utopia of the finished work, the metaphor of her life.
