A unique combination of English, European, feminist, and "New Writing" essays on literary studies from the 1920s to the 1980s, this book sheds new light on the main theoretical issues involved in the study of modern literary texts. The book includes the views of leading critics and theorists such as Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Frank Kermode, Edward Said, and Lionel Trilling, as well as such renowned writers as W.H. Auden, Umberto Eco, Seamus Heaney, Czeslaw Milosz, and Virginia Woolf. Focusing on major critical topics--genre, interpretation, history and criticism, gender, and race--Literature in the Modern World provides a critical awareness of the debates likely to dominate future discussions of literature.