Modern English Literature: From Chaucer to the Present Day (Hardbound - 2020)

Modern English Literature: From Chaucer to The Present Day critically examines the famous authors of English Literature spread over a long period, and covers more or less the whole range of those English authors whose work can be read without the intervention of the philologist or the Professor of dead dialects. The book aims at maintaining an individual point of views, at laying stress on ideas and tendencies rather than at recording facts and events, and it does not hesitate to draw generously on standard works of criticism and biography with which students are familiar. Many authors are not mentioned, and others receive scanty treatment, because of the necessities of this method of approach. The book aims at dealing with the matter of authors more than their lives. It pretends no more than to be a general introduction to a very great subject, and it will have fulfilled all that is intended for it if it stimulates those who read it to set about reading for themselves the books of which it treats.

The book has ten chapters along with Bibliography, Chronological Tables, and Index. It contains: The Renaissance, Elizabethan Poetry and Prose, The Drama, The Seventeenth Century, The Age of Good Sense, Dr. Johnson and His Time, The Romantic Revival, The Victorian Age, The Novel, and Contemporaries. The book will be found of great interest by the students of English Literature, researchers, and the general readers.

G.H. Mair (8th May, 1887—2nd January, 1926) was a British journalist and civil servant. He was educated at Aberdeen Grammar School (University of Aberdeen), Christ Church (Oxford), and the Sorbonne. In 1909 he got a job as leader writer, drama critic, and special correspondent on the Manchester Guardian, and was appointed political correspondent and literary editor in London in 1911. He became the assistant editor of the Daily Chronical in 1914.

On the outbreak of the First World War, Mair attempted to join the Armed Forces, but was decreed medically unfit and instead joined the Foreign Office, becoming head of the Department of Information. When the Ministry of Information was formed in 1918, he became Assistant Secretary. He was appointed Assistant Director of the League of Nations Secretariat in Geneva, and then returned to London as head of the League of Nations Office. He later returned to journalism as drama critic for the Evening Standard.