The Modern Tradition: Backgrounds of Modern Literature

This comprehensive anthology, edited by the acclaimed scholars of modernism, Richard Ellmann and Charles Feidelson, is arranged thematically with essential readings from the Western European tradition symbolism, realism, nature, cultural history, the unconscious, myth, self-consciousness, existence, and faith. Readings include examples from Romanticism, the aesthetic movement of the late 19th century, the art theories of cubism, dadaism and futurism, and the philosophical queries of existentialism. Writers represented span the 19th and early 20th centuries and include Wilde, Rilke, Picasso, Baudelaire, Yeats, Nietzsche, Eliot, Joyce, Pound, Marx and Sartre.