Contents -- General Editor's Preface -- List of Figures and Tables -- A Note on References -- Introduction: Modern Beginnings -- Part I: Elements -- 1. The Modern Literary Market -- 2. Modern Authorship -- 3. Modern English Usage -- Part II: Forms -- 4. Modern Poetry -- Verse Technique -- Hardy and Yeats -- Masefield, Brooke, Thomas, and 'Georgian' Poetry -- Imagism and After: Pound, Eliot, Sitwell, and Lawrence -- W. H. Auden and the Poetry of the Thirties -- Trends, Anthologies, and Reputations -- 5. Modern Drama -- From Problem Play to Discussion Play -- Comedy of Manners: Maugham and Coward -- Historical and Verse Drama -- 6. Modern Short Stories -- 7. The Modern Novel: Principles and Methods -- 8. The Modern Novel as Social Chronicle -- Provincial Chronicles and Sagas -- Condition of England, Industrial, and Civic Novels -- 9. The Modern Psychological Novel -- Realism and the Education Novel -- High Modernism, Memory, and Consciousness -- 10. Modern Romance, Fable, and Historical Fiction -- Romances of Truancy -- Historical Novels -- Fabulous Romances -- Visionary Romances -- 11. Modern Satire -- Verse Satire: Hardy, Eliot, and Sassoon -- Prose Satire: Huxley, Waugh, and Others -- 12. Modern Essays, Biographies, Memoirs, and Travel Books -- 13. Modern Entertainment: Forms of Light Reading -- Detective Fiction -- The Thriller -- Romantic Love Stories -- Comical Prose Fiction -- Part III: Occasions -- 14. England and the English -- Names for England -- England Epitomized -- England Explored -- The English Character -- The English Abroad -- 15. The Great War -- Survivals of Heroic Literature -- Four Phases of War-Writing -- Passivity, Martyrology, and War Myths -- 16. Childhood and Youth -- 17. Sex and Sexualities -- Sex-Talk in the Freudian Age -- Realism, Deviance, and Censorship -- Erotic Writing.

Retrospect: Three Decades of Modern Realism -- Author Bibliographies -- Suggestions for Further Reading -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z.