The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English

by Brian McHale (Editor), Randall Stevenson (Editor)

An imaginatively constructed new literary history of the twentieth century.This companion with a difference sets a controversial new agenda for literary -historical analysis. Far from the usual forced march through the decades, genres and national literatures, this reference work for the new century cuts across familiar categories, focusing instead on literary ‘hot spots’: Freud’s Vienna and Conrad’s Congo in 1899, Chicago and London in 1912, the Somme in July 1916, Dublin, London and Harlem in 1922, and so on, down to Bradford and Berlin in 1989 (the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the new digital media), Stockholm in 1993 (Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize) and September 11, 2001. The Companion * reanimates twentieth-century literary history* gives unique insight into the literary imagination via the focus on pivotal times and places* provides an unprecedented view of literatures in English in global contexts from Berlin to Bradford, Florence to Flanders, Lagos to Liverpool, Madrid to Melbourne, and San Francisco to Stockholm* offers illuminating analyses of authors and texts from across the century* brings together expert contributors from around the world.

304 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2006

About the author

Brian G. McHale is a US academic and literary theorist who writes on a range of fiction and poetics, mainly relating to postmodernism and narrative theory. He is currently Distinguished Humanities Professor of English at Ohio State University. His area of expertise is Twentieth-Century British and American Literature.

McHale is the editor of the journal Poetics Today: International Journal for Theory and Analysis of Literature and Communication. He has taught at Tel Aviv University and West Virginia University; he was visiting professor at the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Freiburg (Germany), and the University of Canterbury (New Zealand). McHale was an honorary professor, from 2009 to 2011, at Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. He is co-founder, with James Phelan and David Herman, of Project Narrative, an initiative based at Ohio State University. He is the past President (2011) of The Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present, and President of The International Society for the Study of Narrative.