Professional Documents
Culture Documents
LMW Reading List
LMW Reading List
What follow are details of books and articles which tutors teaching the module
have themselves found useful. The list is arranged in the order in which
topics come up on the syllabus, and is particularly meant to help when you
are preparing for assessed essays and the exam. It is confined to ‘secondary’
material – work about the authors and topics, rather than by the set authors
themselves. Often, though, in fact, the best approach to a particular work or
genre is to read more ‘primary’ material - something else by the same writer,
or of a similar kind.
Other background material can be found on the Web – and, of course, on the
shelves of the university library.
Michael Bell, Literature, Modernism and Myth: Belief and Responsibility in the
Twentieth Century (1997)
Clive Bloom, ed., Literature and Culture in Modern Britain, volume 1: 1900-
1929, 1993 [esp. the Introduction]
John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice among the
Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (1992)
Dennis Walder, ed., Literature in the Modern World: Critical Essays and
Documents, 1990
Clive Bloom and Brian Docherty, American Poetry: The Modernist Ideal, 1995
2
W.B.Yeats
Roy Foster, W.B.Yeats: A Life, , vol 1. The Apprentice Mage, 1997; vol. 2,
The Arch-Poet, 2003
David Pierce, Yeats’s Worlds: Ireland, England and the Poetic Imagination,
1995
T.S.Eliot
Cleo McNelly Kearns, T. S. Eliot and Indic Traditions: A Study in Poetry and
Belief, 1987 [esp. section on ‘Metaphysics in The Waste Land’, p 195f.]
Nick Selby, ed., T.S.Eliot: ‘The Waste Land’ (Icon Critical; Guides), 2000
Steve Axelrod and Helen Deese, eds., Critical Essays on William Carlos
Williams, 1995
Charles Doyle, ed., William Carlos Williams, The Critical Heritage, 1980
Walter Allen, Tradition and Dream: The English and American Novel from the
Twenties, 1964
James Joyce
Morris Beja, ed., ‘Dubliners’ and ‘A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man’: A
Casebook, 1973
Franz Kafka
Harold Bloom ed., Franz Kafka's 'The Trial': Modern Critical Interpretations,
1987
Julian Preece, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Kafka, 2002 [see esp. Rolf
J. Goebel’s article, ‘The Exploration of the Modern City in The Trial’]
Virginia Woolf
Jane Goldman, ed., Virginia Woolf: ‘To the Lighthouse’, ‘The Waves’ (Icon
Critical Guides), 1997
Toril Moi, 'Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?', in Sexual / Textual Politics, 1985
Sue Reid, ed., ‘Mrs Dalloway’ and ‘To the Lighthouse’: Contemporary Critical
Essays, 1993
Sue Roe and Susan Sellers, eds., The Cambridge Companion to Virginia
Woolf, 2000
Henry Green
Rod Mengham, The Idiom of the Time: The Writings of Henry Green, 1982
Jeremy Treglown, Romancing: The Life and Work of Henry Green, 2000
5
Samuel Hynes, The Soldier’s Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War, 1997
Gill Plain, Women’s Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power and
Resistance, 1996
Arthur Marwick, The Sixties, Cultural Revolution in Britain, France, Italy, and
the United States, c. 1958-c.1974, 1998.
Blake Morrison, The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s,
1980
George Orwell
Elizabeth Bowen
Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle, Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of
the Novel, 1995
Heather Bryant Jordan, How Will the Heart Endure: Elizabeth Bowen and the
Landscape of War, 1995
Heather Bryant Jordan, How Will the Heart Endure: Elizabeth Bowen and the
Landscape of War, 1992
Primo Levi
S.Kremer, Memory and mastery: Primo Levi as writer and witness, 2001
Risa Sodi, A Dante of Our Time: Primo Levi and Auschwitz, 1990
Anthony Rudolf, At an Uncertain Hour: Primo Levi’s war against oblivion, 1990
Samuel Beckett
John Fletcher, Samuel Beckett: Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Krapp’s Last
Tape (London: Faber, 2000)
Hugh Kenner, Samuel Beckett: A Reader’s Guide (NY: Farrar, Straus &
Giroux; London: Thames & Hudson 1973)
James Knowlson and John Pilling, Frescoes of the Skull: The Later Prose and
Drama of Samuel Beckett (London: John Calder, 1979)
Sylvia Plath
Claire Brennan, The Poetry of Sylvia Plath (Icon Critical Guides), 2000
Gary Lane, ed., Sylvia Plath: New Views on the Poetry, 1979
Annette Lavers, ‘The World as Icon’, in The Art of Sylvia Plath, ed. Charles
Newman, 1970
8
Fionn MacColla
Cairns Craig, The modern Scottish novel: narrative and the national
imagination,1999
Ngugi wa Thiong’o
James Ogude, Ngugi’s Novels and African History: Narrating the Nation,
1999