Auden's elegy for Freud uses a phrase that has passed into the language. Freud, he says, 'is no more a person / now but a whole climate of opinion'. By November 1939, the influence of the founder of psychoanalysis seemed to pervade the artistic and intellectual cultures of theWest - even the literary culture of England, a country that talks a lot about the weather. In Auden's own work, however, Freud's centrality was not quite so assured; his significance was sometimes equal to, at other times actually less than, that of figures such as Georg Groddeck and Homer Lane. He would have found out about Freud, probably, in connection with his father's medical practice. According to Humphrey Carpenter, Dr Auden was 'paying a lot of attention' to Freud in 1925 (Carpenter, p. 40). Auden's introduction to the ideas of Groddeck and Lane, however, was effected by John Layard, who was living in Berlin when Auden made his first visit there in 1928. Although he was later to refer rather cruelly to 'loony Layard', this name-calling owed less to Auden's opinion of Layard's ideas than to his shock at being asked to finish the job when Layard bungled a suicide attempt. This troubled figure was an enthusiastic disciple of Lane, whose papers he collected and collated for what became Lane's only published work, Talks to Parents and Teachers (1928). His extra significance for Auden consisted in his simultaneous and complementary investments in both psychology and anthropology. Layard had travelled to Malekula in the New Hebrides in 1914-15 with W. H. R. Rivers, whose book Conflict and Dream (1923) was to supply Auden with material for 'Paid on Both Sides'. Layard's own papers on the 'Flying Tricksters of Malekula' would inform the composition of The Orators. From the start of his career as a writer, Auden became used to thinking about psychological models in relation to the customs and rituals of an entire society, rather than exclusively with reference to the personal history of the individual.

One story that eighteenth-century critics liked to tell about themselves was the triumph of criticism itself, its rise and progress from modest beginnings before the Restoration to a respected place in English literature. ‘Dryden may be properly considered as the father of English criticism, as the writer who first taught us to determine upon principles the merit of composition’, Samuel Johnson wrote in his Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets (1779–81). Earlier poets like Shakespeare ‘wrote without rules’, and a few hints had been given by Jonson and Cowley, ‘but Dryden's Essay on Dramatick Poetry [1668] was the first regular and valuable treatise on the art of writing’. Since that time, Johnson continues, sound critical principles had become ‘universally practised’; even the common reader was now a good critic.

The success story of criticism is exemplified by Johnson's own Prefaces. Commissioned to enhance a massive collection of English poetry from Cowley to Gray, they were soon printed separately as Johnson's Lives of the English Poets, which went through many editions. Readers valued the critical effort to sort and judge the poets who represented the nation, and the pleasures of poetry seemed incomplete without the pleasures of talking about it. Johnson's stature as a leading authority on language and literature as well as the conduct of life contributed to the keen public interest in his opinions. But the habit of supplying works with critical prefaces had been ingrained in English since the time of Dryden, who constantly formulated principles to justify what he published. Without such a preface, a new text might look naked.

We are perhaps entitled to assume that the words ‘myth’ and ‘modernity’ named sharply antithetical things. Myths are thought to be primordial and universal. Modernity, along with its cultural and artistic complement, Modernism, is both urgently present and geopolitically particular. Myths and mythical thinking are what modern culture has gone beyond and, whether willingly or unwillingly, left behind. The effort to understand, engage with or revive myth is an effort on the part of modern writers and artists to enter into habits of thought, belief and feeling that are nothing if they are not not-modern. The point of myth is precisely that it is not modern, and the pursuit of myth is therefore a form of the effort to ‘think the unthought’ that seems to be a definitional part of Modernist cultural aspiration.

Modernity is sometimes identified with the ideal of Enlightenment that grew up in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. But the Enlightenment relationship to myth is much simpler than that of Modernism. For early Enlightenment thinkers such as Bernard de Fontenelle, myth was part of the apparatus of superstition, credulity and ignorance from which reason was attempting to unpick itself. Myth was, in a sense, the past itself, insofar as the past came to be thought of, not merely as different from the present, but as darkness, error, infancy, impediment, in short, as the antagonist of the present as it strove to realise itself. But the capacity of reason to free itself from myth could also be a proof of its self-corrective capacity.

In January 1939, Sigmund Freud presented Virginia Woolf with a narcissus. The gift, we can suppose, was a token of appreciation from the analyst to his English publishers. Thanks to the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press, Freud’s writings not only received a British audience, but were also introduced into the heart of the Bloomsbury enterprise. Perhaps unconsciously (or perhaps not) Freud’s choice of a narcissus was particularly apposite for a writer who so often put the self at the centre of her work. Narcissus, the self-centred image-lover, speaks eloquently to certain strands of literary Modernism and to the psychoanalytic project. Both put the self at the centre of their enquiries, and both try to find a new language to describe that self or, to be more precise, try to render what is most obscure about that self newly intelligible. Indeed, one way to think about the relationship between psychoanalysis and literature in this period is as a joint venture in forging a new language for the unconscious. From the science of the psyche and the art of the modern writer emerges a distinctly modern materialism for the dreamworld. But, and this is a paradox that lies at the heart of both psychoanalysis and literary Modernism, the self that both return to endlessly in this endeavour is not, as it were, in full possession of itself, but is rather characterised by a recognition of the limits of its own self-knowledge. What the Modernist poet and the free-associating patient both do, the psychoanalyst and critic Adam Phillips has argued, is inject ‘something irreducibly enigmatic into the culture, something no one quite knows what to do with’.

It is not uncommon to refer to various decades in the twentieth century as if they possessed a character of their own, displaying marks of identity not shared by the decades preceding or following them. The 1930s might seem from this point of view the most self-contained decade in the literary history of the last century, bounded on one side by the beginning of the Depression, and on the other by the outbreak of World War II. It is a period deeply marked by the misery of large-scale unemployment, by the rise of Fascism in Europe, and by the Spanish Civil War (1936–9), a conflict that effectively politicised a whole generation and saw the loss in combat of many of its members.

A surprising number of writers active in the 1930s were prepared to take up clear political positions, in a way and to a degree that has never been paralleled in Britain, before or since. When the pamphlet Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War was published in 1937, one hundred and twenty seven writers expressed support for the Republican side in the conflict, with five against, and only sixteen placing themselves in the ‘neutral’ category. Having a political position, and writing from it, was not just a common desideratum; for much of the decade it was felt to be an urgent necessity. Any reading of thirties’ literature has to attend to the problems that writers encountered in determining a position and perspective from which to speak.

George Barker replied mischievously to a questionnaire sent to poets by the magazine Agenda in 1989: ‘You kindly invite me to make “a few remarks about the state of poetry in England and Ireland” or something such. I have only one remark which is that I have been seeking far and wide for this fabulous mastodon and in several years only glimpsed it once and I think it was called a Tony Harrison.’ Is the idea of an English or a British poetry really extinct, and if not, can it be embodied in representative poets such as Tony Harrison (or other influential figures such as Simon Armitage, Carol Ann Duffy, Jenny Joseph, Andrew Motion, J. H. Prynne, Tom Raworth or Denise Riley)? Many poets and editors appear to think not, and to agree with the poet Michael Schmidt (who would seem to be in a unique position to judge, having created the leading independent poetry press, Carcanet, and edited the most influential poetry review, PN Review): ‘I detect no coherence in the poetry scene, readership, approaches, or anything else in Britain.’ Throughout the past thirty years there has been a pervasive insistence on singularity, typified by this remark from Geoffrey Hill: ‘I’ve not found that anybody’s expectations have led me to qualify or modify my own work.’ Some poets regret this. Lee Harwood says: ‘I once believed in the idea of a community of artists, I think mainly because [of] that whole sixties’ euphoria, but reality contradicted that fairy tale.’

The Indian-born Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), who throughout his career wrote from a sense of being un-English and ‘unhomely’, although himself a writer in English, was one of the first openly to recognise that British culture and literature were shot through and through with the experience and the perceptions of empire. This chapter, ‘Empire and Modern Writing’, aims to expand on some of the implications of Kipling’s thought. It will suggest that understanding British society at the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century in all its fissiparous uncertainty, its fears of degeneration coupled with its convictions of cultural superiority, entails placing that society inside the complicated context of its longstanding colonial engagements. Here lie many of the sources of its chronic paranoia; here is located the contact zone with those other cultures in relation to which it understood itself. This was a time when the British Empire had reached its greatest geographic extent ever, even as British industrial power was for the first time feeling the pinch of competition from Germany and the United States. Whether they were writing swashbuckling adventure tales, or probing inner structures of feeling, writers were not unaware of this impress of the rest of the world not only on the British Isles, but on the millions of miles of its imperial borders. As Kipling himself memorably put it in a poem calling for a greater imperial awareness in Britain: ‘And what should they know of England who only England know?’

The British Modernist novel did not discover time in the years after the World War I. Before Modernism, outside Britain, and in other genres, the mysteries of temporality had disclosed themselves. Within the English novel, Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights are luminous and unforgettable precedents. But there can be little doubt that in the first post-war decade, at a moment of vaulting ambition in the High Modernist novel, time became such a dominant concern that it can be taken as a cultural signature. In the years after the war, it ceased to be a background for literary events, an invisible medium surrounding the enactment of a plot. It became rather a fully thematised subject in its own right – a fact that can be seen in the epigraphs to this chapter, where time becomes an upper-case abstraction, indeed a protagonist as real as the fictive human agents.

At the outset we need to distinguish three aspects of the problem: (1) the time of modernisation that surrounds and permeates the literary experiments; (2) the representation of temporality within the fictional world; and (3) the forms and structures of narrative time.

‘It’s got here at last!’ So Cyril Connolly greeted the appearance in 1935 of David Gascoyne’s A Short Survey of Surrealism with a degree of surprise we may still share. Why had it taken so long for Surrealism to arrive in England? Andre Breton had, after all, presented the founding manifesto back in 1924 and the first experiment in automatic writing, The Magnetic Fields, which he co-produced with Philippe Soupault, had appeared four years before that. The war, of course, had closed borders, literally and metaphorically, and having survived the conflict without suffering invasion or revolution, England in the immediate wake of 1918 would be largely untroubled by the waves of crisis and nihilism which swept most European countries and which generated the newest avant-garde tendency, Dada. While Italian Futurism had launched itself on London in a spectacularly dramatic fashion, Dada would remain an obscurely ‘foreign’ phenomenon, receiving only patchy mention in literary magazines and never generating sufficient oppositional energy to initiate a parallel English movement in the way that Marinetti had lit the charge for Vorticism.

What was known of the Dada group and the Surrealist tendency it had spawned by 1920 came mostly by way of little magazines rather than from direct personal contact, and the time-lag in picking up on the new movements also meant that it was difficult for most English readers to disentangle Dada, with its poetics of outrage and negation, from Surrealism, with its more affirmative and often prophetic stance.

In these early years of the new century, there is an urgent need to rewrite the literary histories of Britain that are now nearly a hundred years old and showing their age for contemporary students and scholars. The last Cambridge Literary History of the period – volumes VIII to X of a twenty-volume set, The Cambridge History of English Literature – appeared between 1906 and 1917, at its end right in the thick of the Great War. Devoted mainly to essays on the great male writers of the period – for example, volume IX is subtitled ‘From Steele and Addison to Pope and Swift’ and volume X is called ‘The Age of Johnson’ – these volumes remain an impressive achievement, full of essential information and deep as well as gracefully worn learning that modern scholars might well envy and seek to emulate. The old Cambridge History of English Literature is still very useful and well worth reading. But there is a serenity in its essays by predominantly male Oxbridge dons that at the beginning of another new century we no longer possess; there is in those volumes an untroubled confidence in their enterprise and in the value of literary history that has been eroded if not destroyed by nearly a century of intellectual upheaval as well as by profound social and moral transformations in Anglo-American culture and in the world at large. Since that first Cambridge history appeared, literary studies have changed as radically as the political and social world we live in, and in the last forty years or so, since the early 1960s, there has been a disorienting succession of intellectual revolutions (the word is not too strong) whereby the notion that literature is a privileged artistic and cultural institution has been challenged by many critics.

If any work by Elgar belongs to the internationally recognised canon of orchestral masterpieces, it is the Variations on an Original Theme, Op. 36; yet this was only his second large-scale orchestral work to reach performance. Elgar's growing skill and imagination in deploying large orchestral forces were already evident, and his claim that The Black Knight was a kind of choral symphony suggests a conscious direction of his career towards that form, ‘the highest development of art’. The Variations accomplished his first breakthrough to international success. The concert overture Froissart (Op. 19), composed for the Three Choirs Festival at Worcester (1890), is scarcely less remarkable, as the earliest of Elgar's larger orchestral conceptions to survive his self-criticism, or his unwillingness to finish large-scale compositions for which no performance could be anticipated; earlier works inspired by the Lake District and Scotland were abandoned, as was an early attempt at a violin concerto. By the time he composed Froissart Elgar was already well into his thirties, and its orchestral mastery derives from practical experience, as well as intense study of orchestral scores and alert listening when the opportunity arose. Elgar's break with what, in his intermittently tactless inaugural lecture at Birmingham, he identified as the ‘whiteness’, the ‘false rhapsody’, of English music is nowhere more apparent than in the brilliance of his orchestral inventions.

Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun claimed that ‘if a man were permitted to make all the ballads, he need not care who should make the laws of a nation’. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, then, at least one shrewd political observer recognised a relationship between nation, power and a particular literary kind associated with popular, anonymous production. National consciousness demands not only literary history, but also literary production. This story of scholars and antiquaries, translators and editors, and writers who ambiguously filled the roles required by what the age demanded will begin with the shaping notions of poets and move to the most controversial poet, who billed himself as a translator.

Although the term ‘Folk-Lore’ was not coined until 1846 by the antiquary William J. Thoms as a Saxon replacement for ‘Popular Antiquities’, the antiquities not of classical Greece and Rome but of the British Isles, the project itself can be seen as part of or related to a number of literary developments in the eighteenth century, including what René Wellek dubbed ‘The Rise of English Literary History’: the editing of early English literature, the revision of the canon, the concern for the oxymoronic ‘British classics’, as a title of 1796 put it. This activity was in turn part of larger interests in the past complexly forwarded by a range of developments at mid century including primitivism, the end of Jacobite threats, the awareness of a long and rich vernacular literary tradition.

Swift's satiric vision

It is one of those wonderful quirks of language and history that ‘Yahoo’ is now the name of an Internet search engine, whereas Jonathan Swift invented the word as the degenerate moniker for the most irredeemable creatures on earth ever to sling excrement. Swift approached the early eighteenth century as Luddites today approach the early twenty-first: the new is a source of deep anxiety. Not only did Swift resist experimental science, speculative philosophy, expanded credit-based trade economy, weapons technology and colonisation, but also modern ways of dispensing information – newspapers and journals, self-help literature, mass-culture entertainments, schemes for social improvement and memoir-based narratives. The more modern, progressive, immediate something was, the more Swift's satiric inner voice was suspiciously attuned to it and infuriated by it.

Swift's satire is abundant and various, but several themes and propositions dominate his work, some of which appear in his sermons, essays, and letters as well. One recurrent Swiftian notion holds that the human race is on a degenerative path. Things get worse for Swift; they do not get better: ‘But men degenerate every day, merely by the folly, the perverseness, the avarice, the tyranny, the pride, the treachery, or inhumanity of their own kind.’ Another notion holds that even bad things are made worse by a spirit of opposition that factionalises all institutions, ideas, loyalties. Swift writes to his friend and fellow satirist, Alexander Pope, on 10 January 1721, ‘the spirit of Faction hath so universally possessed the minds of men, that they are not at leisure to attend to any thing else’.