This critical is the essential companion to any course in twentieth-century literature. Drawing upon the work of a wide range of key writers and critics, the selected extracts provide: Clearly conveying the excitement generated by twentieth-century literary texts and by the provocative critical ideas and arguments that surrounded them, this reader can be used alongside the two volumes of or as a core text for any module on the literature of the last century. Texts examined in detail include: Chekhov's , Mansfield's , poetry of the 1930s, Gibbon's , Eliot's , Brecht's , Woolf's , Okigbo's , du Maurier's , poetry by Ginsburg and O'Hara, Dick's , Puig's , Beckett's , Heaney's , Gurnah's and Barker's