Pater to Forster, 1873-1924

'Excellent background reading: a carefully researched and interestingly written survey book of the period. Very useful chronology and annotated bibliography. I enjoyed this book very much and am sure students will, too.' - Ann Heilmann, University of Wales Swansea 'The most up-to-date and comprehensive guide to a fascinating period.' - John Stokes, King's College London 'A very nice 'digest' of the field, accessible to undergraduates...and providing a more compact overview than other such guides.' - Dr Sally Leger, Birkbeck College, University of London

By examining this tumultuous era as an age in its own right, Pater to Forster, 1873-1924 offers the reader a rather different history of the late Victorians and Modernists, and retells that history from a new perspective.Was the late nineteenth century 'Victorian' or 'modern'? Why did the New Woman disappear from literary history? Where did T. S. Eliot's poetics of the city come from?

In this essential guide, Ruth Robbins explores an era often named an 'age of transition' which exists uneasily between the apparent certainties of the Victorians and the advent of a Modernist aesthetics of instability. Robbins considers some of the central literary categories and themes of the period (decadence, realism, nostalgia, New Woman writing, degeneration, imperialism and early modernism) in writings by both major and 'minor' writers, thereby creating a complex picture of transitions, continuities and breaks with the past. By examining this tumultuous era as an age in its own right, Pater to Forster, 1873-1924 offers the reader a rather different history of the late Victorians and Modernists, and retells that history from a new perspective.