The early Twentieth Century produced some of the most exhilarating writing in English. Writers from Britain, America and Ireland were challenging literary conventions in order to seek to accommodate their changed perspective upon a dynamic but newly unsettling world. Social pressures, including accelerating urbanization and innovative technologies, and political pressures, from women's groups and within the British Empire, were all acting to make writers rethink and reshape their work. These pressures were exerted alongside recent intellectual and literary debates emerging from the late nineteenth century. The First World War provided a shock to established ways of life which changed literary possibility utterly. This book considers the major authors and texts of the modernist period, mapping the literary alongside the historical, social and literary issues of the time. It provides a lucid overview and informed readings of works by Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, D.H. Lawrence, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster and many others.