Useful discussions of 18th-century novels are Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel (1987, reissued 2002); John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century (1988); and John Richetti (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Eighteenth-Century Novel (1996).
Helpful for the poetry of the period are Ian Jack, Augustan Satire: Intention and Idiom in English Poetry, 1660–1750 (1942, reissued 1978); Eric Rothstein, Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Poetry, 1660–1780 (1981); and James Sutherland, A Preface to Eighteenth-Century Poetry (1948, reprinted 1970).
Richard Bevis, The Laughing Tradition: Stage Comedy in Garrick’s Day (1980); and Robert D. Hume, The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century (1978, reissued 1990), discuss aspects of theatre.
Literary criticism in the 18th century is surveyed in great detail in vol. 4 of H.B. Nisbet and Claude Rawson (eds.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, The Eighteenth Century (1997). Michael Cordner John Mullan The Romantic period
The general literary history of the period is presented in W.L. Renwick, English Literature 1789–1815 (1963; also published as The Rise of the Romantics, 1990); and Ian Jack, English Literature 1815–1832 (1963, reissued 1998), both part of the series Oxford History of English Literature. Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels, and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its Background, 1760–1830 (1981); and Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (1983), provide analytic surveys of the period. Works that focus on aspects of the literature include M.H. Abrams, The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (1953, reissued 1977), and Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (1971); Harold Bloom, The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry, rev. and enlarged ed. (1971); Stuart Curran, Poetic Form and British Romanticism (1986); John O. Hayden (ed.), Romantic Bards and British Reviewers (1971); Gary Kelly, English Fiction of the Romantic Period, 1789–1830 (1989); Karl Kroeber and Gene W. Ruoff (eds.), Romantic Poetry: Recent Revisionary Criticism (1993); Jerome J. McGann, The Poetics of Sensibility (1996); Theodore Redpath (compiler), The Young Romantics and Critical Opinion, 1807–1824 (1973); and J.R. Watson, English Poetry of the Romantic Period, 1789–1830, 2nd ed. (1992). Nicholas Shrimpton The Post-Romantic and Victorian eras
Studies of the period include Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader, 2nd ed. (1998); Jerome Hamilton Buckley, The Victorian Temper: A Study in Literary Culture (1951, reissued 1981); Walter E. Houghton, The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870 (1957, reissued 1985); Virgil Nemoianu, The Taming of Romanticism: European Literature and the Age of Biedermeier (1984); Basil Willey, Nineteenth Century Studies: Coleridge to Matthew Arnold (1949, reissued 1980); and Philip Davis, The Victorians (2002), the last being vol. 8 of the series Oxford English Literary History. Studies of special subjects are presented in Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics (1993); P.K. Garrett, The Victorian Multiplot Novel (1980); George P. Landow, Elegant Jeremiahs: The Sage from Carlyle to Miller (1986); George Levine, The Realistic Imagination (1981), and Darwin and the Novelists (1988); George Rowell, The Victorian Theatre, 1792–1914, 2nd ed. (1978); John Sutherland, The Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction (1988; also published as The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction, 1989); and Michael Wheeler, English Fiction of the Victorian Period, 1830–1890, 2nd ed. (1994). Nicholas Shrimpton The 20th century From 1900 to 1945
Michael H. Levenson, A Genealogy of Modernism: A Study of English Literary Doctrine, 1908–1922 (1984), is a meticulously detailed history of the Modernist movement in England. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century, 3 vol. (1988–94), a monumental study, has fundamentally altered approaches to British literature. Christopher Gillie, Movements in English Literature, 1900–1940 (1975), is a straightforward introduction to the fiction, poetry, and drama of the period. Michael H. Levenson (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Modernism (1999), is an excellent collection of lucid and well-informed essays. Vincent Sherry, The Great War and the Language of Modernism (2003), analyzes the verbal experiments of Modernist fiction and poetry, including the work of Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot. Vincent Sherry (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War (2005), provides a valuable survey of the major British writing occasioned by World War I.
Literary historians have largely neglected the 1920s as a decade with a distinctive literature, but David Ayers, English Literature of the 1920s (1999), makes an important contribution, while John Lucas, The Radical Twenties: Writing, Politics, and Culture (1997), retrieves the long-forgotten radical writing of the decade. Valentine Cunningham, British Writers of the Thirties (1988), provides a still-unsurpassed account. Important reevaluations of the 1930s appear in Janet Montefiore, Men and Women Writers of the 1930s (1996); and Keith Williams and Steven Matthews (eds.), Rewriting the Thirties: Modernism and After (1997). The literature of the World War II period is ably discussed in Robert Hewison, Under Siege: Literary Life in London, 1939–45, rev. ed. (1988). Bernard Bergonzi, Wartime and Aftermath: English Literature and the Background 1939–60 (1993), provides a detailed account of mid-century literature. Adam Piette, Imagination at War: British Fiction and Poetry, 1939–1945 (1995), discusses a wide range of British poets and novelists with great subtlety and insight.
David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry, 2 vol. (1976–87), is a broad study stressing the interplay between British and American poetry. British poetry of the 20th century has been comprehensively examined in Gary Day and Brian Docherty, British Poetry 1900–50 (1995), and British Poetry from the 1950s to the 1990s (1997). Hugh Alistair Davies Literature after 1945
Informative general surveys of fiction, poetry, and drama include the following: Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel, rev. ed. (2001); Michael Gorra, After Empire (1997); Allan Massie, The Novel Today: A Critical Guide to the British Novel, 1970–1989 (1990); D.J. Taylor, After the War: The Novel and English Society Since 1945