Far from the traditional march through the decades, genres, and national literatures, this anthology focuses on literary "hot spots": Freud's Vienna and Conrad's Congo in 1899, Chicago and London in 1912, the Somme in July 1916, Dublin, London, and Harlem in 1922, all the way through to Toni Morrison's Nobel Prize in Stockholm in 1993 and September 11, 2001. The Companion launches a controversial new method for understanding twentieth-century world literary history and includes illuminating critiques from expert contributors.