This Cambridge History is the first major history of twentieth-century English literature to cover the full range of writing in England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. The volume also explores the impact of writing from the former colonies on English literature of the period and analyses the ways in which conventional literary genres were shaped and inflected by the new cultural technologies of radio, cinema, and television. In providing an authoritative narrative of literary and cultural production across the century, this History acknowledges the claims for innovation and modernization that chracterise the beginning of the period. At the same time, it attends analytically to the more profound patterns of continuity and development which avant-garde tendencies characteristically underplay. Containing all the virtues of a Cambridge History, this new volume is a major event for anyone concerned with twentieth-century literature, its cultural context, and its relation to the contemporary.