Randall Stevenson is Reader in English Literature and Deputy Head of Department at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Modernist Fiction (1992; revd. edn, 1998); A Reader's Guide to the Twentieth-Century Novel in Britain (1993); The British Novel Since the Thirties (1986), and many articles on modernist and postmodernist fiction.

For much of the period covered here the literature of England was dogged by an all-pervading sense of failure and decline. In Stevenson's analysis, a "misplaced nostalgia" impeded the progress of English drama, fiction and especially poetry. Philip Larkin mourned an "England gone", and he cast a long shadow over English verse. "English literature was never more static than under the influence of the Movement," says Stevenson. "If the later 20th century proved a difficult period for poetry, it was in large measure because it took so long to realise this, and move on."

• I. HISTORIES; II. POETRY; III. DRAMA; IV. NARRATIVE; I. HISTORIES; II. POETRY; III. DRAMA; IV. NARRATIVE

Randall Stevenson is Reader in English Literature and Deputy Head of Department at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Modernist Fiction (1992; revd. edn, 1998); A Reader's Guide to the Twentieth-Century Novel in Britain (1993); The British Novel Since the Thirties (1986), and many articles on modernist and postmodernist fiction.

For much of the period covered here the literature of England was dogged by an all-pervading sense of failure and decline. In Stevenson's analysis, a "misplaced nostalgia" impeded the progress of English drama, fiction and especially poetry. Philip Larkin mourned an "England gone", and he cast a long shadow over English verse. "English literature was never more static than under the influence of the Movement," says Stevenson. "If the later 20th century proved a difficult period for poetry, it was in large measure because it took so long to realise this, and move on."

• I. HISTORIES; II. POETRY; III. DRAMA; IV. NARRATIVE; I. HISTORIES; II. POETRY; III. DRAMA; IV. NARRATIVE

Randall Stevenson is Reader in English Literature and Deputy Head of Department at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of Modernist Fiction (1992; revd. edn, 1998); A Reader's Guide to the Twentieth-Century Novel in Britain (1993); The British Novel Since the Thirties (1986), and many articles on modernist and postmodernist fiction.

For much of the period covered here the literature of England was dogged by an all-pervading sense of failure and decline. In Stevenson's analysis, a "misplaced nostalgia" impeded the progress of English drama, fiction and especially poetry. Philip Larkin mourned an "England gone", and he cast a long shadow over English verse. "English literature was never more static than under the influence of the Movement," says Stevenson. "If the later 20th century proved a difficult period for poetry, it was in large measure because it took so long to realise this, and move on."

• I. HISTORIES; II. POETRY; III. DRAMA; IV. NARRATIVE; I. HISTORIES; II. POETRY; III. DRAMA; IV. NARRATIVE