Near the end of Mel Brooks's Blazing Saddles (1974), a fight breaks out in a saloon. As the brawl escalates, a wall of the saloon is knocked down to reveal another movie being made, a high society musical in the Fred Astaire/Ginger Rogers vein. Soon hyper-masculine cowboys fight effeminate dancers in a clash of classic film genres. This scene reveals the basic theme of Hollywood-on-Hollywood movies: movies are not true-to-life; instead they conform to strict genre formulas to create their own “reality.” Movies about Hollywood are well known and popular. Films like Singin' in the Rain (Stanley Donen, 1952) and Sunset Boulevard (Billy Wilder, 1950) share Blazing Saddles's delight in making viewers feel like insiders in the know about moviemaking. Even when there is an apparent critique of the film industry, it isn't genuine. At a silent film premiere, Gene Kelly's character is interviewed and delivers a stereotypical high-art story of his rise to fame that is undercut by the visual images of a child of the urban ghetto dancing in saloons and pool halls and then working as a stuntman before chancing into a starring role. The silent era, the film strongly implies, was a fake and elitist era but the new Hollywood of the sound era allows for genuine stories about real people. Similarly, Sunset Boulevard is brutally critical of the narcissism that characterizes the silent studio's star system. Norma Desmond now lives in a delusional world because she was ultimately nothing but the creation of the studios. While the silent era was unwittingly comical in Singin' in the Rain, here it is grotesque, but for the same reason. More recent films about Hollywood like the Coen brothers' Barton Fink (1991) and Robert Altman's The Player (1992) are certainly more genuinely critical of the film industry, only celebrating Hollywood's influence on culture in ironic and black comedic ways.

Upton Sinclair's Oil! (1927) begins as a dream of speed. Sinclair calls his opening chapter “The Ride” and bases it on a trip he and his wife Craig took with a big oilman who wanted to buy two lots they owned on Signal Hill, near Long Beach. He “asked us to come and look at a ranch he offered in exchange,” Craig writes in Southern Belle (1957). “So we let him drive us in a big fast car, breaking all the speed laws.” The property they saw that day would become the Watkins Ranch in San Elido, the site of Dad's big strike in Oil! and a place that would stimulate in Sinclair a prescient depiction of the soon-to-be-developed oil field near Bakersfield at Kettleman Hills. “The road ran, smooth and flawless,” Oil! begins, “precisely fourteen feet wide, the edges trimmed as if by shears, a ribbon of grey concrete, rolled out over the valley by a giant hand. The ground went in long waves, a slow ascent and then a sudden dip; you climbed, and went swiftly over - but you had no fear, for you knew the magic ribbon would be there, clear of obstructions, unmarred by bump or scar, waiting the passage of inflated rubber wheels revolving seven times a second.” / Thrown into “a storm of motion,” Sinclair's reader can only come along for the ride. Like Dad, his “business is with the things that lie before” him, “and the past is past.” As impatient a driver as he is deliberate a businessman, Dad wants “a speed law turned inside out,” and dreams of a California where it will one day be illegal, on such roads, to drive less than forty miles an hour. “You were racing with the other people, who were always threatening to get your oil.”

After several decades of inquiry, scholars agree that Los Angeles defies the conventions of urban theory. To some, it models a new paradigm of decentralized development, although others find in the city's sprawl extremes of the excess and deprivation characteristic of capitalist cities. Still others depict Los Angeles as the immigrant entrepôt of the twenty-first century. While detractors still dismiss it as one big movie set, recycling the myth of Tinseltown, in America (1988), Jean Baudrillard extends the notion of Los Angeles as a land of simulation beyond Hollywood by noting the effects on the regional life and landscape of such signature Southern California industries as informatics, genetics, the fitness industry, and New Age therapies. Like all cities, Los Angeles excites a range of emotions, but as the twelfth-largest urban area in the world, brimming with almost eighteen million inhabitants, Los Angeles remains fixed in the urban imagination. How do we know Los Angeles and where does that knowledge come from? This is a complicated question with too many easy answers. It has become a cliché, for example, to implicate Hollywood in spinning a marketable identity of Los Angeles through a century of film and television production. That “knowledge,” prone to distortion, hyperbole, and much mythology, is suspect, but the images rendered on television and movie screens nonetheless continue to shape popular understandings of the city.

Bede was in many ways a natural historian. He was deeply interested in the past. He liked to sort things out, get things right. Indeed he was so good at this that he has been viewed as a modern scholar avant la lettre. But that interest in accurate information is deceptive. Bede had an agenda. He was above all a Christian scholar and exegete, and for him, history, although unquestionably interesting for its own sake, had moral purpose. To study and to write history was to participate in a dynamic process: the unfolding of God's purposes for mankind as the world moved towards final judgement and the end of time. Such an approach linked history with hagiography, the lives of the saints, which told of men and women through whom God had worked his purposes on earth. To the modern mind, these two disciplines might seem at odds. History is about particularity, about the specificity of the past, albeit searching out patterns in the flow of events. Hagiography as a genre is dominated by topoi, by models and conventions, for it seeks to show through the surface detail of particular and individual human lives the underlying quality common to the saints in their service to God. It is also much concerned with miracles, with God's interventions in the natural world to demonstrate the holiness and power of his elect.

The Venerable Bede occupies a pivotal place and moment in the history of Western education. By the seventh century public schools no longer existed in Europe; only scattered remnants of the liberal aristocratic educational system of the Roman empire remained in northern Italy and Spain, none at all in Gaul and Britain. Bede's lifetime coincides with the revival of education and the beginnings of a new medieval Christian culture in the West. Bede's monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow is the nodal point and Bede the intellectual force that link the civilization of the ancient world with the Carolingian renaissance, which fuelled in its turn the renaissances of the twelfth and the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In Britain, the old educational system had disappeared without leaving a trace. Missionaries from the continent and from Ireland, beginning with the Gregorian mission under Augustine in 597, carried out their work of conversion most effectively through the establishment of monasteries. Monks had to be trained for their vocation; monastic schools followed inevitably. Irish models of scholarship and monastic education exerted their influence throughout the seventh century. There was no formal division of the curriculum into subjects along the lines of the seven liberal arts of late classical antiquity. Pupils learned what they needed to know by a kind of apprenticeship system.

Shakespeare and Chaucer are more famous English authors than Bede, who wrote nothing in the English language that has survived. But his place in English culture is, like theirs, a lasting one, if only because his account of the cowherd Cdmon in the Ecclesiastical History of the English People supplies an iconic narrative for the origins of vernacular poetry (IV. 24). Even though his fame, for many readers, hangs on this slender thread, Bede has long been recognized not only as a great author but also as a distinctively English writer. Bede did not think of himself as English, however, and those who admiringly refer to him as English risk the error of implying either that Bede wrote in English or that his sense of the English people corresponds to theirs. The last two words in the title of Bede's most famous work - Historia ecclesiastica gentis Anglorum - are ambiguous. A gens is a people as opposed to a nation or tribe, but all three ethnic units are notoriously difficult to describe. Anglorum could refer to the continental Angles, a people named by Bede among the foreign settlers of Britain; to those who lived in Northumbria in his own time, or to Mercians; to all those tribes that eventually became the 'English', an inclusive term for Angles, Saxons and several other ethnic groups; or to those who spoke English. Yet, as if these specific meanings did not exist, generations of readers after the Old English period have found their own views mirrored in Bede's and have seen him as English in the same way they see themselves.

One of the best-known stories in Bede's Ecclesiastical History tells of a council meeting at the court of King Edwin of Northumbria around 627 (II. 13). The king had been listening to the preaching of a missionary bishop from Canterbury named Paulinus and had nearly made up his mind to accept baptism and become a Christian. But first he wanted to confer with his chief counsellors in order to ask their opinion of this unfamiliar doctrine and new form of worship. The chief priest of the old religion, whose name was Coifi, wryly observed that, although he had been the most loyal servant of the pagan gods, he had not received as much honour and wealth from the king as others who were less devout. 'So it follows that if, on examination, these new doctrines which have now been explained to us are found to be better and more effectual, let us accept them without any delay' (p. 183). Another one of Edwin's counsellors agreed, but for somewhat different reasons. This unnamed advisor compared a human being's life on earth to the flight of a sparrow that flies into the king's banquet hall in winter. For a brief span of time, the sparrow is warmed by the fire and protected from the storm outside, but then it flies out again into the cold. 'So this life of man appears but for a moment; what follows or indeed what went before, we know not at all. If this new doctrine brings us more certain information, it seems right that we should accept it' (p. 185). Soon afterwards, the king was baptized along with several members of his family and many of the people.

“A good deal about California does not, on its own preferred terms, add up.” Joan Didion, Where I Was From (2003) / Defining the geographic extent of Los Angeles is the first challenge for anyone who would study its literature. Concentration defines New York, where even Brooklynites refer to Manhattan as “the city.” Los Angeles is defined by sprawl. Much of iconic Los Angeles, from the beaches of Baywatch to the streets of Beverly Hills, 90210, lies beyond the city limits. The larger Los Angeles County still fails to encompass Disneyland, Fontana (Mike Davis's “Junkyard of Dreams”), and Huntington Beach, whose pier is “one of the constituent monuments of the surfing life.” As a literary subject, however, Los Angeles is less a city, county, or “metropolitan statistical area” than a state of being (of grace, fear, emergency, or exception, depending on whom one reads) anchored in the area south of the Tehachapi Mountains, north of San Diego, west of the desert, and squarely in the collective imagination of utopia, dystopia, and, more recently, the urban future. A tour of some of mythic Los Angeles' landmark features will introduce our subject. More than any other American city, Los Angeles is a city made of words. It “did not so much grow as sell itself into existence,” William Alexander McClung observes. This marketing effort was not limited to the Chamber of Commerce and developers. The visual and verbal artistry of painters, photographers, and writers like the coterie around Charles Fletcher Lummis at the magazine Land of Sunshine, and even the logos on crates of produce shipped back east, helped to transform climate into a “palpable . . . commodity that [could] be labeled, priced, and marketed.”

The aim of this chapter is to explore when, where and to what extent Bede was treated as a saint in the medieval period. In the early Middle Ages, there existed no generally agreed process for recognizing saints. Not until the twelfth century did the popes take control of the process of canonization, based on evidence of the saint's posthumous miracles and, in the case of a martyr, manner of death, or, in the case of a confessor, outstandingly virtuous life. This process, however, did not apply to those who were already being treated as saints. Bede was certainly never canonized in the formal sense. In 836, the Council of Aachen called him 'venerable', but not so much as a title as in the context of a description of him as 'the priest Bede, in these modern times a venerable and admirable teacher'. Only in 1899 did the pope give him the title of Doctor of the Church, with his feast being formally adopted into the Roman Catholic Church but placed since 1969 on 25 May, rather than 26 or 27 May, on which it was generally celebrated in the Middle Ages. If Bede was treated as a saint in earlier periods, it must have been in the vaguer, more local, more informal way by which saints were recognized before the advent of papal canonization. There seem to have been several parts to this process. Firstly, someone had to compose texts that described the saint's life, death and miracles, working from a variety of sources, including oral tradition, possibly with a strong local flavour (that is, such a tradition would be strongest in areas invested in Bede's reputation).

From California's entrance into the Union in 1850 until the end of World War I, speakers of English - “Anglos” in California usage, regardless of ethnic ancestry - generated a large, though now mostly forgotten, popular literature in and around Los Angeles. What is of interest in the literary history of this otherwise ignored era is not the few works that rise above mediocrity, but the fact that almost all of these fictions merge imperceptibly with travel writing to constitute a literature of place, obsessed with analyzing, publicizing, and critiquing both the found and the constructed landscape. “Place” is the thesis of LA literature in the era that saw Anglos move from frontiersmen to bourgeoisie; the fictions they wrote and read are largely a pretext for appropriating Los Angeles to their own historical imperatives and cultural needs. A definition of “Los Angeles”: at the beginning of the period, it is synonymous with all of Southern California, or at least the region comprising today's counties of Ventura, Los Angeles, San Bernardino, Orange, and Riverside. Furthermore, the Mojave Desert presses upon Los Angeles' literary consciousness. Paradoxically, the dimensions of “Los Angeles” contract as the old pueblo itself becomes sufficiently populated to merit attention. At certain points other communities claim their own share of attention and become venues for subsets of the literary production of the period, especially the independent health-and-pleasure resort towns like Pasadena.

When the Venerable Bede composed the literary autobiography that closes the final chapter of his Ecclesiastical History of the English People, he wrote out of concern for his legacy and for the benefit of future readers of his works. According to his own humble description, the primary purpose of his literary endeavours had been to clarify the Holy Scriptures and their interpretation 'for [his] own benefit and for that of [his] brothers' (V. 24, p. 567). Taken at face value, these words suggest that Bede wrote mainly for his fellow monks, the present and future members of his own twin community of Wearmouth-Jarrow. Indeed, there can be little doubt that the local brethren were a concern of his, but at the same time there is ample evidence that he thought his works would reach a much wider audience. After all, if he truly had thought that his works were going to remain within his own monastic family - among those who knew him well and who could be relied upon to keep his memory alive - why would he have composed an autobiographical sketch in the first place, and especially one in which he speaks of his brethren in the third person? The autobiographical sketch itself demonstrates that he envisioned his works reaching a wider audience.

“'It is not hard. Take your pen and mend it, and then write fast.'” - Bede / The epigraph comes from a story related by Bede's student, Cuthbert, in a letter he wrote to a fellow student describing their teacher's death. In the story, young Wilberht asks Bede, who is on his deathbed, if it would be too hard to finish dictating the book he is writing. Bede replies as above. According to the story, he finishes his task before his peaceful death. Cuthbert's letter, which includes the short English poem known as 'Bede's Death Song', was widely circulated in England and the continent in the early Middle Ages; it survives in over forty manuscripts from the ninth to the twelfth centuries. Whether the story recounts the truth about Bede's dying words and actions is imponderable, but the letter, its circulation and the story it contains reveal how Bede's students revered him. His students, including Cuthbert and Egbert (archbishop of York, 735-66), played a crucial role in popularizing and preserving Bede's writings. They spread his books, reputation and teaching style into the later Anglo-Saxon period. Egbert's student, Alcuin (c. 735-804), abbot of Tours, took many of Bede's writings to the court of Charlemagne, where they were incorporated into the Carolingian Reform, a channel via which they later returned to England.

The Pacific Fish Center is an unlikely destination for Korean tourists, but in the summertime thousands bring their visiting relatives and friends from Korea to this ramshackle eatery on a well-trodden portion of Redondo Beach Pier, about a dozen miles south of Los Angeles International Airport. All sorts of bivalve mollusks, shrimp, and - most importantly for these customers - crab and lobster swim in individual tanks in the front of the restaurant, a marine manifestation of Southern California's seeming treasure. Here, one can enjoy seafood with plates of kimchi, the staple Korean side dish of spicy pickled cabbage, as well as soju, the fermented, potato-derived beverage that in Los Angeles is as commonly consumed as Japanese sake. Here, the tourists' server is unlikely to be Korean himself; rather, he will probably hail from El Salvador or Guatemala, but will still converse fluently in Korean with staff and clientele alike. While visitors to Los Angeles may initially marvel at such proficiency in someone who looks nothing like themselves, the longtime residents of Southern California's many Koreatowns will barely skip a beat, and instead complain that their steamed king crab hasn't arrived soon enough. The server will apologize and bark at a fellow Latino feverishly keeping up with similar orders to hurry up - in Korean. Twenty miles eastward and inland, in an unassuming storefront sandwiched between a clothing store and another restaurant, young Koreans work late into the night creating a flyer in three languages: Korean, English, Spanish.

Los Angeles' “coolie riots” of 1871, in which nineteen Chinese were “hanged and shot in one evening,” never attained literary memorialization; but they confirmed a trend that was to become typical of Los Angeles, where riots tended to be upsurges of public violence against scapegoat minorities. The first such pseudo-event to receive literary attention was the “Red hysteria” of 1919. As Los Angeles adapted to the afterglow of the Great War, the anti-Bolshevik propaganda emanating from Washington percolated down into everyday acts of violent anti-Leftism. Police Chief George K. Home raided the Industrial Workers of the World hall on October 2, and crowed to the press that the “cleanup” would continue “until the last of their number has been placed behind bars or driven from the city.” Servicemen and citizens took this task into their own hands: “about twenty-five men in full uniform of the Army and Navy together with a few civilians raided the IWW headquarters. . . while a 'defense' meeting was in progress, drove out the occupants, hospitalized four, and demolished the furniture and equipment. Five of the alleged IWW members were arrested and charged with inciting a riot.” The incident was processed into the climax of Upton Sinclair's 1927 epic, Oil!: “There came rushing down the street a squadron of motor-cars, two abreast and blocking the way entirely; and from them leaped a crowd of some fifty men, carrying weapons of various sorts, clubs, hatchets, pieces of iron pipe. They made a rush for the entrance [of the IWW hall], and a moment later the music ceased, and there came a sound of shrieks, and the crash of glass and battering of heavy blows.”

Swift claimed, late in life, to have been ‘only a Man of Rhimes, and that upon Trifles, never having written serious Couplets in my Life, yet never without a moral View’. There are many subtexts to this statement, one of which is that he was a prolific poet, almost as prolific as his friend Pope, whose ‘serious Couplets’ he admired but thought himself unfitted for. Swift bowed before the mastery of Pope in the higher discursive styles, content perhaps with his own standing as the greatest prose author of his time. But his autobiographical poems show that he thought of himself, and was thought of by others, as a poet. Swift wrote almost as much verse as Pope, if we exclude Pope’s Homer translation, and he has always been admired (and sometimes preferred to Pope) by poets, including Byron, Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Geoffrey Hill, Derek Mahon and Ted Hughes. Swift’s regard for the couplet which Pope perfected and which became the dominant mode of serious poetic expression in his day, was as genuine as his reluctance to use it himself.

‘Only a Man of Rhimes’ is Swift’s acknowledgment of the supremacy of ‘serious Couplets’ and of Pope. It may also be seen as a refusal to compete. The hegemony Pope exercised over poetic standards, though Swift was happy to accept it, cannot be said to have determined his choices. Well before he knew Pope or Pope was known as a poet, Swift had developed his comic tetrameter style with such poems as ‘Verses Wrote in a Lady’s Ivory Table-Book’ (1698), and ‘Baucis and Philemon’ (1709). His poetic career began with a handful of odes in the wedding-cake stanzas of which Cowley’s ‘Pindariques’ were the famous English example, and one or two poems wholly or mostly in ‘serious Couplets’, in honour of Congreve and Swift’s patron Sir William Temple. A possibly apocryphal story that Dryden told Swift ‘Cousin Swift, you will never be a poet’ (or a ‘Pindaric poet’, versions differ) may be responsible, as Samuel Johnson reported, for Swift’s hatred of Dryden, and perhaps also, if true, for his almost total retreat from high styles throughout the rest of his writing career.

Jane Spencer, citing Dustin Griffin, has observed that the period following the interregnum ‘was a transitional one between a court-based literary culture and a market-based print culture’. Aphra Behn, like Milton and Dryden, belonged ‘to both cultures – the old world of patronage and the new world of booksellers’. Whereas the next chapter focuses in detail on three of Dryden’s major poems (discussed more briefly and with different emphases, here), this chapter places Dryden alongside his fellow writers, in particular Aphra Behn, in order to explore the nature of Restoration poetry. It sees Behn and Dryden as occupying a liminal relation to previous and subsequent writing, as well as arising out of a larger context of contemporary poetry, including Rochester, Oldham, Killigrew and Philips, and looking towards Pope and Swift. In particular, areas of continuity between their poetry can be found in their responses to the heterogeneous diversity of nature, their representations of sexuality and forms of engagement with contemporary religious debate. Above all, perhaps, traditional in the broadest sense of the word, but emerging from a context of courtly libertinism, the poetry of both is engaged with the nature of individual freedom.

Critical and biographical commentary has often identified troubling contradictions and silences in the life and work of both artists: Dryden’s timely conversion to Roman Catholicism is sometimes seen as existing in tension with his assertions of poetic integrity, Behn’s political conservatism with the liberal probing of the boundaries of sexuality and gender in her poetry. Literary tradition has sometimes also oversimplified the work of both, contrasting Behn unfavourably with Philips or Finch, Dryden with Pope and Rochester, and underestimating the scope for complexity and ambiguity within their apparently transparent styles.

The rediscovery of women’s poetry has transformed the literary landscape of the eighteenth century. As recently as the early 1980s, students and general readers confronted a canon far narrower and almost exclusively male. Although so-called ‘Augustan’ verse had always offered more generic and stylistic diversity than the social and political satire by which the age is often stereotyped, very few poems by women appeared in anthologies or on university syllabuses. Of the several hundred items in Geoffrey Tillotson, Paul Fussell and Marshall Waingrow’s compendious Eighteenth-Century English Literature (1969) there are only four poems by women – three by Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea, and one short lyric by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. Charles Peake’s Poetry of the Landscape and the Night (1967), a kind of ‘alternative’ eighteenth-century verse anthology, included only one piece by a woman, Finch’s ‘Nocturnal Reverie’. Yet by the mid 1980s much had changed. Feminist criticism and scholarship had invested heavily in rediscovering literary ‘mothers’; and a wide range of textual scholars had started to undertake the challenge of editing some of the many coterie manuscript poems by women which represented a significant facet of female writing of the period. Roger Lonsdale’s ground-breaking Eighteenth– Century Women Poets (1989) helped place in the public domain unfamiliar women poets, some published and popular in their own time, who had since disappeared from view. Eighteenth-century women’s poetry is now widely accessible in both anthologies and individual scholarly editions, and numerous names have now augmented literary syllabuses – the outspoken teenage poetess Sarah Fyge Egerton; the labouring poets Mary Leapor, Mary Collier and Ann Yearsley; middle-class admirers and followers of Pope and Swift, such as Mary Jones and Mary Barber; those who courted scandal for their unconventional lives and autobiographical self-disclosure, such as Laetitia Pilkington and Martha Fowke Sansom.