本书是对1910至1940年间的“现代”文学的回顾与概括，其主体按文类或体裁划分，对重要作家和作品进行讨论，如此处理使每个文类的发展和状况得到了全面的展示。

General Editor's Pre[ace
List o[ Figures and Tables
A Note on References
Introduction: Modern Beginnings


Part I Elements
1. The Modern Literary Market
2. Modern Authorship
3. Modern English Usage
Part II Forms
4. Modern Poetry
Verse Technique
Hardy and Yeats
Masefield, Brooke, Thomas, and 'Georgian' Poetry
Imagism and After: Pound, Eliot, Sitwell, and Lawrence
W. H. Auden and the Poetry of the Thirties
Trends, Anthologies, and Reputations
5. Modern Drama
From Problem Play to Discussion Play
Comedy of Manners: Maugham and Coward
Historical and Verse Drama
6. Modern Short Stories
7. The Modern Novel: Principles and Methods
8. The Modern Novel as Social Chronicle
Provincial Chronicles and Sagas
Condition of England, Industrial, and Civic Novels
9. The Modern Psychological Novel
Realism and the Education Novel
High Modernism, Memory, and Consciousness
10.Modern Romance, Fable, and Historical Fiction
Romances of Truancy
Historical Novels
Fabulous Romances
Visionary Romances
11. Modern Satire
Verse Satire: Hardy, Eliot, and Sassoon
Prose Satire: Huxley, Waugh, and Others
12. Modern Essays, Biographies, Memoirs,
and Travel Books
13. Modern Entertainment: Forms of Light Reading
Detective Fiction
The Thriller
Romantic Love Stories
Comical Prose Fiction
Part III Occasions
14. England and the English
Names for England
England Epitomized
England Explored
The English Character