"This book provides the student for the first time ever with an anthology in which the major representatives of the schools and movements of European literature seek to explain the assumptions and practices which characterize their writing. Each chapter is devoted to one particular school or movement from within the broad body of literature, from romanticism, realism, and modernism through to the literature of political engagement of the 1920s and 30s, and the more recent initiative of postmodernism."

"The introductions to each chapter help outline both the key thematic and stylistic features of these movements and the historical factors that helped 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 here translated for the first time). These texts are approached both on their own terms as individual formulations of the goals and procedures, literary, aesthetic, and political, that characterized the work of these writers, and as key documents of the literary school or movement to which these writers belonged."--Jacket.