Modernism is a major literary movement of the first part of the twentieth-century. The word Postmodern literature is used to describe certain tendencies in the literature procuded after the World War II.

Irish writers were especially important in the twentieth-century, including James Joyce and later Samuel Beckett, both central figures in the Modernist movement. Americans, like poets T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound and novelist William Faulkner, were other important modernists. British modernists include Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Dorothy Richardson, Virginia Woolf, and D. H. Lawrence. In the mid-twentieth-century major writers started to appear in the various countries of the British Commonwealth, including several Nobel laureates.

• Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile and And Then There Were None, detective novels written by Agatha Christie.
• The Riddle of the Sands, an example of spy fiction written by Erskine Childers.
• James Bond 007 novels by Ian Fleming, such as Casino Royale (1953), Live and Let Die (1954), Dr. No (1958), Goldfinger (1959), and Thunderball (1961) nine short story works.
• Peter Pan, by J. M. Barrie.
• The Thirty-Nine Steps, an adventure novel by John Buchan.
• The Wind in the Willows, a children's classic by Kenneth Grahame.
• The Chronicles of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis
• The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien.
• James and the Giant Peach and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, children's fantasy novels by Roald Dahl.
• Harry Potter, by J. K. Rowling .
• 2001: A Space Odyssey, by Arthur C. Clarke.
• The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, a omic science fiction work by Douglas Adams.

• Ahlquist, Dale (2012), The Complete Thinker: The Marvelous Mind of G.K. Chesterton, Ignatius Press, ISBN 978-1-58617-675-4.
• Davies, Marion Wynne, ed. (1990), The Bloomsbury Guide to English Literature, New York: Prentice Hall.
• Drabble, Margaret, ed. (1996), The Oxford Companion to English Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Fulk, RD; Cain, Christopher M (2003), A History of Old English Literature, Malden: Blackwell.
• Ward, AW; Waller, AR; Trent, WP; Erskine, J; Sherman, SP; Van Doren, C, eds. (1907–21), History of English and American literature (Encyclopedia), New York: GP Putnam's Sons University Press.

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