A Sinking Island: The Modern English Writers

by Hugh Kenner

A study of the main figurea on the literary scene in twentieth-century England, including Hardy, James, Bloomsbury, Shaw, and Empson

Genres: Nonfiction, Literary Criticism

290 pages, Paperback

First published January 12, 1988

Reviews

[Jess · Rating 5 out of 5]

I savored this late-career gem: an elegant argument dropped via interweaving of anecdote, social history, and exegesis. Rolls along nicely in a rich but not forbiddingly dense mode—far fewer adamantine syntactical flexes than in The Pound Era—but still just remarkably well-written. Occasionally (and uncharacteristically) funny, too: Auden in his sixties was ‘a big seamed ruin.’ 😂

[J. Alfred · Rating 3 out of 5]

So if you've got a vague feeling that nothing important has happened in British literature since uh, Dylan Thomas? Auden, maybe? Perhaps one of these guys Geoffrey Hill or Basil Bunting you've heard a little bit about? Well, this book, written in the 80s by one of the best critics we've had in the past hundred years, tends to agree. This is kind of a long lament for the England, and the London, which was really a literary capital and is no more.
Fans of Kenner will note that this is one of the books where Kenner's disparagement of Bloomsbury in general, and even of Virginia Woolf in particular, is particularly powerful. (This is one of the things he gets attacked for in his reviews.)