European Literature from Romanticism to Postmodernism: A Reader in Aesthetic Practice

European Literature from Romanticism to Postmodernism provides for the first time an anthology in which the major representatives of the schools and movements of recent European literature explain the assumptions and practices that characterise their writing. Each chapter is devoted to one particular school or movement from within that broad body of literature, from romanticism, realism and modernism through to the literature of political enagement of the 1920's and 1930's, and the more recent initiative of postmodernism. The introductions to each chapter outline the key thematic and stylistic features of these movements, as well as the historical factors that helpes shape the broader direction of European literature at this time. The extracts have been taken from the major theoretical texts associated with these writers, from manifestos, essays, letters and other sources (often translated here for the first time). These texts are approached both on their own terms as formulations of the goals and procedures (literary, aesthetic and political) that characterised the work of individual writers, and as key documents of the literary scholls and movements to which they belonged.Martin Travers is Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies in the School of Humanities at Griffith University, Australia. He has published widely in the area of European literature.