The aim of this work is to focus on the non-dramatic works of the early period of modernism in England with an emphasis on the origins and development of key writers and poets. Other such studies date to the mid1980s (Michael Levenson, Sanford Schwartz, Stan Smith, e.g.) and tend to lean heavily toward intellectual history or poetics. This work strives to include a broad mix of thought as to the issue and the purpose of modernism including cultural anthropology, mythology, impressionism and the use of architectural space, with some attention to publishing (the development of the English short story , emergence of literary magazines, and use of literary reviews in creating a “public’ for new writing) . Also, as opposed the edited collections such as Shiach or Whitworth research is not confined to a single genre nor strays from the focus of literary as opposed to other modern movements then in creation. Vital currents of modernism such as literary feminism, secular humanism/Darwinism and place and placelessness are also discussed.
The writers and poets discussed include Pound, Eliot, Wyndam Lewis, T.E.Hulme, Hardy, F.M.Ford, Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf , Walter Pater, “Michael Field”, Henry.James, Oscar Wilde and E.M.Forster.
Contributors include Tyrus Miller, University of California, Santa Cruz,
Elizabeth Foley O’Connor, Fordham University,
Jason B. Jones, Central Connecticut State University
Charles Sumner, University of Southern Mississippi
Carme Font Paz, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
Lori M. Campbell, University of Pittsburgh
Elizabeth A. Primamore, Borough of Manhattan Community College, CUNY
Robert McParland, Felician College
Sheng-yen Yu, National Taipei University of Technology
Gregory F. Tague, St. Francis College
Alex Moffett, Northeastern University
Mitchell R. Lewis, Elmira College
Divya Saksena, Middle Tennessee State University
Yevgeniya Traps, Graduate Center, CUNY
Daniel Moore, University of Birmingham, UK
Allan Johnson, University of Leeds, UK
Wayne Stables, Trinity College, Dublin
Timothy Vincent, Duquesne University
Monika Gehlawat, University of Southern Mississippi
Tom Henthorne, Pace University
Katherine Isobel Baxter, Hong Kong University

“This substantial volume organized around thematics of Origins of English Literary Modernism allows essays on the fin de siècle to talk interestingly to those on Edwardians and Georgians and they in turn to studies of early modernist masters. The emphasis on genealogy of modernism holds the volume together but does not keep individual essays from fresh and interesting explorations, little magazines in the fin de siècle, Bennett's early criticism, historiography in Vernon Lee, Baedeker in E. M. Forster: a rich and interesting collection toward study of the long twentieth century.”

John Maynard, Professor of English, New York University, and Co-Editor of Victorian Literature and Culture.