Introduction

Summary

As the first Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, this volume has a difficult brief. The last century has yet to compose itself definitively as a ‘period’, and our volume has to reckon with the fact that the concluding phases of the century will often prompt provisional comment rather than a sense of summative closure. The volume also covers a period in which questions of history and nation are particularly volatile, and while taking its place in an extended series of literary histories, recognises that for its precursors ‘English’ has generally been a less contentious term than it is now. In this History, ‘Englishness’ is not merely a given attribute of the literature under discussion, but a cultural condition in which complex questions of identity and location are constantly at stake.

It is also important to note here that the volume is intended as a history rather than as a Companion or as an anthology of essays on the period. In that sense it reflects a particular self-consciousness in the period itself about historical change and the changing relation of cultural forms. The History thus recognises the claims for cultural innovation and modernisation that characterise the beginning of the period at the same time as it attends analytically to the more profound patterns of continuity and development which avant-garde tendencies characteristically underplay. Along with this tension between change and continuity – and perhaps another version of it – is the troubled relation of internationalist perspectives to nationalist ones.