The Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century Literatures in English

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.

• 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