The Modern Movement: A TLS Companion

by John Gross (Editor)

For the past ninety years the Times Literary Supplement has scrutinized, dissected, applauded, and occasionally disparaged the work of the twentieth century's leading writers. It has taken a major role in the making—and breaking—of literary reputations.

In The Modern Movement , John Gross has assembled an entertaining selection of 155 articles and reviews about and by the great figures of literary modernism. The focus is on twelve key modernist W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Wolf, W. H. Auden, Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, and Franz Kafka. Another section gathers ten reviews and articles by Eliot and Woolf on then current writers and writing. In addition, there are more general articles on literary trends and issues by such prominent writers and critics as Anthony Burgess, Wallace Stevens, Anthony Powell, and Erich Heller.

This fascinating array reveals early opinions on what have come to be the classics of modernist literature. Readers will be treated to astute and often surprising opinions of their favorite writers on the most important literature of this century.

336 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1993

About the author

John Gross was the editor of The Times Literary Supplement in London, a senior book editor and book critic on the staff of The New York Times in New York, and theatre critic for The Sunday Telegraph. He was also literary editor of The New Statesman and Spectator magazines.

Reviews

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a compilation of more than one hundred fifty articles and reviews about the great literary figures of modernism. Included are sections on Yeats, Pound, Lawrence, Joyce, Eliot, Woolf, Auden, Proust, Mann, Rilke, Kafka and Wyndham Lewis. Contributors range from Burgess and Bayley to Erich Heller and Anthony Powell. The contributions are mainly short essays but rich beyond words. They provide a boon companion for augmented your reading of any of these modernists and a concise source book for browsing and wonder at the possibility that was known as "modernism". I highly recommend this collection.