European Literature from Romanticism to Postmodernism: A Reader

This work offers the student an anthology in which the major representatives of the schools and movement of recent European literature seek to explain the assumptions and practices which characterise their writing. Each chapter is devoted to one particular school or movement from within the broad body of literature, from romanticism, realism and modernism through to the literature of political engagement of the 1920s and 1930s, and the more recent initiative of postmodernism. The introductions to each chapter outline both the key thematic and stylistic features of these movements and the historical factors that helped shape the broader direction of European literature at this time. The extracts have been taken from the major theoretical texts associated with these writers, from manifestos, essays, letters and other sources. These texts are approached both on their own terms as individual formulations of goals and procedures, literary, aesthetic and political, that characterized the work of these writers, and as key documents of the literary school or movement to which these writers belonged.