[The Social Context of Modern English Literature] treats literature as a social product: it occupies "a middle ground between literary study, sociology and intellectual history." It is broadly concerned with the "modernization" of the social world and the ideas of a distinctively "modern" literature.

Professor Bradbury studies the intellectual response to large changes: the concentration of men in cities, the machine, shifts of administrative power. He also describes the changes that affect the production of the literary work: writers' finances, periodicals, publishing, media. Much of his book's considerable value is due to the careful relation of hard, limiting facts to complicated ideas.

He gives a balanced and intricate historical account of the writer's idea of his function in a liberal society. Throughout the modern period (1870 to now) he discerns a tension between an excited hopefulness, a feeling that the artist is a free man, rid of the old...