Midcentury Modern Writers opens new vistas in modernist studies by restoring undervalued writers, genres, and literary movements to the twentieth-century literary canon. The reasons for this critical neglect are manifold, but they include a tenacious bias in favour of male writers associated with the European metropolis, especially London and Paris. Even Virginia Woolf was begrudged a place in the pantheon of ‘High Modernism’ until the resurgence of feminism in the 1970s. Meanwhile, other distinguished women writers of the midcentury, along with their male contemporaries, have receded from view, overshadowed by towering figures like Joyce and Eliot.

The purpose of this series is not to topple these figures but to enrich our sense of the contestation between forms and genres in the midcentury period, roughly from 1928 (when British women were finally granted the vote on equal terms with men) to the 1960s. The traditional modernist canon, comprising a small band of experimental pioneers, obscures not only the creative wealth and variety of these five decades but even those features that distinguish modernists from their literary rivals. A fresh view of the period, undistorted by the fetishisation of modernism, reveals that the mainstream is often difficult to distinguish from its tributaries; tradition and experiment overlap in ways that disrupt conventional critical taxonomies and hierarchies. Likewise, highbrow and popular literary forms galvanise each other, despite the so-called ‘great divide’ that critics have imposed between them.

Midcentury Modern Writers includes both single-author studies and wide-ranging thematic and generic surveys of the period. The authors of these original studies have been selected from established and emergent voices in Anglophone literary studies on the basis of their expertise, inventiveness, and clarity, in the expectation that this series will open up new avenues of investigation for students and their teachers, as well as for specialists in the field. Ultimately, this series strives to change the way we read, teach, and study modern writing in English.