"Literature, Moderns, Monsters, Popsters and Us" is a selection from more than one hundred articles, reviews and essays written by George Stade and first published in journals such as "Partisan Review", "Hudson Review", "Paris Review", "Harper's", "The Nation", "The New Republic" and "The New York Times Book Review". Stade challenges with his controversial contention that "womanism" has triumphed over "manism" and his wit flies with a rip-roaring excursion into "snot, navel-fluff and toe-jam" in an examination of James Joyce's "Ulysses". The collection includes: Psychoanalysis and the horror genre; Popular fiction; Poetry, including e.e. cummings and Sylvia Plath; Frisch and Durrenmatt; McCarthyism; and Modern British fiction.

Critical and interpretive studies, from the Columbia Essays on Modern Writers series, of the work of Bennett, Waugh, Ford, Conrad, Woolf, and Forster.

This volume is one of an expanding literary reference work of encyclopaedic dimensions which aims to provide critical introductions to the works, lives, and thoughts of the writers who have shaped the cultural heritage of the western world. This edition extends coverage with 23 essays on novelists, poets, philosophers, historians and playwrights, who have come to the fore in the period 1950-1980 and who are now regarded as indispensible to the literary scene. The list comprises: Samuel Beckett, Edward Bond, Anthony Burgess, Lawrence Durrell, John Fowles, William Golding, Graham Greene, Ted Hughes, Arthur Koestler, Philip Larkin, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, V.S. Naipaul, John Osbourne, Harold Pinter, Paul Scott, Peter Shaffer, Muriel Spark, Tom Stoppard, David Storey, Dylan Thomas, Patrick White and Angus Wilson.