A broad, accessible account of European modernism as a truly cosmopolitan movement.

This Companion explores the international aspects of literary modernism by mapping the history of the movement across Europe and within each country. The essays place the various literary traditions within a social and historical context and set out recent critical debates.

This Companion offers a comprehensive analysis of U.S. modernism as part of a global literature. Recent writing on U.S. immigration, imperialism, and territorial expansion has generated fresh reasons to read modernist novelists, both prominent and forgotten. Written by a host of leading scholars, this Companion provides unique approaches to modernist texts.

A survey of 25 major European novelists from Cervantes to Kundera, highlighting their contributions to the genre.

Often regarded as the greatest German poet of the twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926) remains one of the most influential figures of European modernism. In this Companion, leading scholars offer informative and thought-provoking essays on his life and social context, his correspondence, all his major collections of poetry including most famously the Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, and his seminal novel of Modernist anxiety, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Rilke's critical contexts are explored in detail: his relationship with philosophy and the visual arts, his place within modernism and his relationship to European literature, and his reception in Europe and beyond. With its invaluable guide to further reading and a chronology of Rilke's life and work, this Companion will provide an accessible, engaging account of this extraordinary poet whose legacy looms so large today.

Publisher description

This volume takes an interdisciplinary approach to Irish modernism, offering readers an accessible overview of key writers and artists.