Between the 1830s, when the words ‘cliché’ and ‘stereotype’ were coined as technical terms for cheap and unchanging page-casts of type – the revolutionary publishing technology that would put a newspaper in every home – and the 1890s, when ‘cliché’ acquired its figurative sense of a stock or hackneyed expression, the first wave of a literary revolution with deep social and philosophical roots shook the foundations of European poetics. Like painters rebelling against the expectations of an audience smitten with the easy verisimilitude of photography, poets revolted against the way that mass journalism habituated a vastly enlarged European reading public to a glib utilitarian rationalism that short-circuited complex thought and feeling. In the words of Ezra Pound (who spoke for the second wave of that revolution), ‘the newspaper criterion that “an article must run straight through from start to finish”… is almost pure kinesis designed not to make the reader think, but to make him accept a certain conclusion’. ‘Literature and philosophy’, he added, differ by a need to ‘constantly diverge from this groovedness, constantly throw upon the perceptions new data, new images, which prevent the acceptance of an over facile conclusion’. Between the two, Pound concluded, there was a ‘war’, and if newspapers won the war Europe would find itself in ‘an order of things in which there would be no art, no literature, no manners, no civilisation’. The battleground on which this war was waged was the cliché, and the stakes involved not just style, but what Pound calls here ‘civilisation’ and elsewhere ‘life’.

Elgar never received a composition lesson in his life. That may be looked at in two ways. The fact that his father kept a music shop has more often than not been seen as a social disadvantage: being born into trade contributed to the chip on his shoulder, and it certainly bothered his wife. But should not the emphasis rightly be on music shop? For what better environment could the penurious young composer have had than the music, books, and instruments all around him: the shop formed his private library, his laboratory. He learned by listening and doing.

His earliest notated piece, which he wrote down in 1867, is a single line in the bass clef, later used in ‘Fairies and Giants’ in The Wand of Youth Suite No. 1. Already present are two abiding elements of his style: loping compound rhythm, and sequences – of five repetitions in bars 2–4. In the answering phrase the first sequential repeat is modified by an accidental, A# in G major. In 1919 Elgar completed his Cello Concerto. The main theme of the first movement is a single line of three two-bar sequences played by the violas; in the soloist's answering phrase the second repeat is modified by an accidental, C# in E minor. The distance between the ten-year-old and the sixty-two-year-old composer at that moment seems touchingly short.

If every eighteenth-century writer came to London carrying a play in his or her hand-baggage, every writer seems to have had pounds of poetry dating back to childhood stashed in bureau drawers. The earliest publications of most eighteenth-century writers are individual poems, and it is often forgotten that the first substantial, even book-length, publication of many writers known today as novelists or playwrights was a volume of poetry. Statistical studies of women writers by Judith Stanton reveal that poetry was women's most popular literary form, and she calculates that 263 women published poetry between 1660 and 1800 (in comparison, she tallies 201 women who published novels). Until 1760, however, the average number of women publishing poetry in a decade was 7; the figures Stanton gives for the next decades are 1760s: 19; 1770s: 36; 1780s: 55; and 1790s: 64. Roger Lonsdale asserts that in the first decade of the eighteenth century only two women published collections of their poetry, while in the 1790s more than thirty did. These figures do not really indicate just how much poetry women were writing or how many women were writing poetry. For instance, we are lucky to know about Jane Brereton, who as ‘Melissa’ carried on a verse correspondence in The Gentleman's Magazine in the mid 1730s, and only eight of Judith Cowper Madan's surviving poems have been published. In the eighteenth century, one was in a periodical, four in fashionable collections and one in her son Martin's Hymn Book (1763). The poetry of Susanna Blamire, among others, was published posthumously, and, because she published so often in periodicals, we will probably never know all the poems Mary Robinson wrote.

Despite deep roots in literary tradition and a far-reaching influence, the periodical essay is a genre that flourished only in a fifty-year period between 1709 and 1759. The rise of the genre begins with John Dunton's Athenian Gazette on 17 March 1691; its maturity arrives part way through Addison and Steele's Tatler (1709–11); and its decline is advanced when the last number of Goldsmith's short-lived Bee is published on 24 November 1759. In between the genre reaches its full flowering in Addison and Steele's daily Spectator (1711–12) and its most transcendent and durable form in Johnson's Rambler (1750–2).

More than most literary genres, the periodical essay belongs to a specific time period because of its tight connection to specific, datable changes in politics, in law and in publishing practices. The periodical essay is proper to a certain phase of periodical publication, which got its start in England during the Civil War but was not fully established until 1702, when the first true daily, the Daily Courant, began. In the early years, government control of the press had a powerful effect on periodical publication, which flourished most when there were disruptions in the government itself. A Census of British Newspapers and Periodicals 1620–1800 contains a chronological list of periodicals in print in Britain. A correlation of this list with political events and relevant legal changes would show that periodical publication always rises at times of national crisis and always falls when licensing laws are enforced. The numbers rise and fall a good deal before 1688, when they rise, never again to fall off very considerably.

Charles II's restoration to the Stuart monarchy and Louis XIV's almost simultaneous assumption of personal rule following the death in 1661 of Cardinal Mazarin, who had served as chief minister after the death of Louis XIII to his widow, Anne of Austria, mark the beginning of a long period – more than a century – in which cultural relations between Britain and the Continent were dominated by rivalry and interchange with France. French influence in Britain had superseded the predominance of Italy and Spain carrying over from the Renaissance, and as part of the still important relations with the Netherlands the contribution of francophone Huguenots became central. In the late eighteenth century intercourse with Germany gained significance, soon to flourish with Romanticism.

For Britain and France these latter years of the seventeenth century were an extended era in which cultural stability and dynamism were combined, in which ‘good sense’ was a central value, promoted by satire and criticism, which increasingly reflected the new power of an informed public. There is an energy common to the English Restoration and the first half of the reign of Louis XIV, only partially captured by the labels ‘neoclassicism’ and classicisme, which carries over into an Enlightenment that is as important in Britain as in France. The common misnomer ‘Age of Reason’ for the European Enlightenment obscures its anti-rationalist character, which emerges clearly once the British component is given due weight, and that means including not only Locke and Hume, but the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, Mandeville, Addison, Gibbon, Johnson and even Burke, the last two so often mistaken for opponents of the Enlightenment.

In 1656 Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, published a short piece she named ‘A True Relation of My Birth, Breeding, and Life’. Near the end, she rather anxiously invoked some ancient autobiographical precedents: ‘I hope my Readers will not think me vain for writing my life, since there have been many that have done the like, as Caesar, Ovid, and many more, both men and women, and I know no reason I may not do it as well as they.’ There were, as she suggests, conspicuous antecedents for autobiography: mostly male, formidably famous, and widely scattered across space and time. But Cavendish's pronouncement works better as forecast than as retrospect. In England over the ensuing century and a half, ‘many more’ writers than ever before, ‘both men and women’, diverse in origin and status, working in both diary and autobiography, manuscript and print, found ample reason that they too, ‘as well as’ the more renowned practitioners of the past, could and should press their own lives onto the page. Some hundred years after Cavendish's assertion, such convictions received another imprimatur. ‘[T]here has rarely passed a life’, Samuel Johnson declared in one essay, ‘of which a judicious and faithful narrative would not be useful.’ In another, he concluded that the most useful such narrative is not biography but autobiography: ‘Those relations are commonly of most value in which the writer tells his own story.’ The practice that Cavendish rather anxiously defended, Johnson confidently affirmed. In the years between, the stimuli towards self-inscription had become more varied, the models and precedents more promiscuous, the means and justifications more widely available.

Between the artistic avant-garde and that cultural stratum called, since the 1840s, ‘bohemia’, there is a historical relationship that is almost self-evident yet difficult precisely to characterise. Both avant-garde and bohemia depend on a stance of separation from the putative mainstream of culture, a conservative, moralising, middle-brow taste of the ‘bourgeois’, the ‘philistine’, or ‘man in the street’. Both seek programmatically to break down barriers between art and life and to fuse them in a integral aestheticisation of everyday life; this, in turn, should invest art with greater existential intensity than in its traditional forms. Both are marked by ambiguous ties to popular culture and more generally to the commercial market in cultural goods; they appear alternately to repel and invite success in the monetary terms of capitalist societies. Indeed, both appear to have their origins in a particular historical matrix: the broad social front of progressive, oppositional elements of the middle-classes in France up to the 1848 uprisings. This social milieu had aspects of both a political and cultural vanguard, and only later, in the course of the reaction that followed the suppression of the mid-century revolutions, would the avant-garde artist proper precipitate out as a distinct social identity. It is a commonplace of cultural history, and by no means a merely banal one, that the avant-garde and bohemia occupy overlapping cultural spaces and exhibit parallel gestures; that the avant-garde, indeed, emerges in some way within the milieu of bohemia and lends the figure of the bohemian a new, reinvigorating stamp.

This chapter examines the role played in cultural politics between the wars by attempts to address changing configurations of literature and readership, mainly in the creation of new journals and magazines, and also in the emergence of a new, vociferous and non-bellettristic form of literary criticism which would have a major impact on the development of literary studies. Serial publications are an important focus, because they are invariably bids to create a literary or cultural public sphere in a changing cultural climate. The nature of the reader and the role of the artist are put into question in these journals, not only in editorials but also in the editorial decisions which shape their contents. The background to this re-evaluation of writing and readership was the continuing extension of literacy following successive Education Acts, the commercialisation of written and other forms of culture, and a perceived extension of the power and importance of the working class. Serious literary authors and critics, the majority of whom were privately educated and belonged to comparatively wealthy families, were confronted by difficult questions concerning the role of high literature and art, and the meaning and purpose of its relationship to any possible audience. Especially in the 1920s, some writers and editors advocated conservatism and a return to religious and institutional order as an alternative to mass democracy or Communism. By the 1930s, new voices had emerged supporting anti-Fascist struggle and seeking to create an alliance of the cultural upper-middle class and the proletariat.

The religious spectrum

It is now more widely recognised than it was a hundred years ago that seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English society and culture was essentially religious in its institutions, practices and beliefs, and that writing on religious subjects dominated the publishing market. Yet as literary readers in the early twenty-first century, we still confine our attention to a handful of explicitly religious works of the period, and we tend to downplay the religious aims and aspects of other works that we regard as predominantly literary or political or philosophical. Behind the major religious works that are still reedited and reissued today – notably Milton's Paradise Lost and Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress – stretches a vast hinterland of works that went through multiple editions in the eighteenth century and often into the nineteenth, but that are now largely neglected except by specialists. This chapter provides a map for exploring this hinterland. But in order to understand the significance of particular works it is necessary first to consider three broad topics: the range of religious denominations and groups and the main political events that affected their relations with each other; the principal theological and philosophical issues that religious writers of different persuasions addressed; and the preferred kinds of religious writing and their functions.

Lamenting the erosion of traditional values, a disillusioned Irish politician is reputed to have complained that there was no sex in Ireland before television. The national television service was inaugurated in 1962. So, assuming that Philip Larkin was right in dating the beginning of sexual intercourse to 1963, sex came to Ireland a full year before it reached the United Kingdom. Sex was only one of the foreign arrivals that came to Ireland during the sixties. Under the expansionist polices of Taoiseach Sean Lemass and his economic adviser T. K. Whitaker, the protectionist strategies of the de Valera era were reversed and an open economy fuelled by international markets and foreign investment was nurtured. The resulting economic growth checked the emigration and unemployment of the forties and fifties, while the cities and towns of Ireland burgeoned around the new factories. Outside Belfast, Ireland had never really had an industrial revolution and the overwhelmingly rural nature of Irish life, when enlisted by nationalist ideology, often emerged as a pastoral ideal, with images of mystic landscapes and cosy homesteads. In literary terms, however, from Patrick Kavanagh’s The Great Hunger (1942) to (perhaps belatedly) Martin McDonagh’s The Leenane Trilogy (1995–7), it became a very familiar manoeuvre to debunk this ideal, and to depict repressive, materially impoverished communities, starved of meaningful spiritual and emotional sustenance. In 1971, though, for the first time in its history, more Irish people were living in towns than in the countryside.

King Edward VII’s reign is a rebellious era, establishing a libertarian agenda for subsequent decades. ‘What [makes] it a new age’, writes J. B. Priestley of the Edwardian period, ‘is not the…conformity it carried over from Victorian England but…all the attempts…to push forward into a freer atmosphere.’ The forward push was enacted by ‘rebels from the middle classes’ who shared ‘a common platform–a belief that…society might be rationally transformed’, might lead to a socialist state, women’s liberation from patriarchy, and dissolution of the Empire. Edwardian writers explored that rebellious common platform.

Priestley emphasises the common platform’s rational aims. But the era’s writers also liberated passions of the mind and body that did not always cooperate with the goals of rational transformation. Moreover, the writers sought an avant-garde autonomy for art: art’s liberty to develop free of responsibility to reflect the world ‘realistically’; free even of responsibility to immediate political relevance. That search for autonomy links Edwardian literature with Modernism and with the post-Edwardian Georgians (so called after King George V). Pursuing artistic freedom, Edwardians, Modernists and Georgians experiment with literary forms and genres. They experiment with realism, and they experiment with romance, understood as a contrast to realism and as a marker of art’s independence. But that experimentation is not pursued for its own sake exclusively: it refers back, however indirectly, to the Edwardian agenda for change. It is possible to argue that, for Edwardians, Modernists and Georgians, both realism and romance have a libertarian reference; and that for them romance largely promotes empire’s dissolution, in contrast to the Victorians’ version, which often promoted imperialist adventure.

Something happened

Between 1700 and 1800 the body of writing we now call ‘Literature’ changed. Whatever the exact placement of the bookends or the particular labels, all of our literary histories of the eighteenth century tell tales of difference. Even proponents of the ‘long’ eighteenth century extend the time frame not because they presume continuity but because they want the discontinuities within their area of expertise. While there is considerable disagreement about the date and nature of those changes, our anthologies enshrine the overall effect: what began as Neoclassical or Augustan ended as Romantic. We know something happened during the eighteenth century but we are not quite sure what it was.

The task is complicated from the start – that is, from our failure to agree on when the ‘eighteenth century’ starts. Although some of our anthologies and literary histories observe the double zeroes, most bundle it into a larger package that starts decades earlier than 1700. Paired with the Restoration, as in this volume, the eighteenth century becomes part of a period (1660–1780) that is fully one-third in the seventeenth century. Blackwell raises that percentage to 40 by pushing the start date back to an even earlier political event; their 1996 anthology runs from the English Civil War (1640) to the French Revolution (1789). ‘Both events’, notes the editor, ‘influenced literature.’

Thus, in 1955, the young Peter Hall voiced a widespread dissatisfaction with the state of British theatre. The post-war period has often been characterised as one of stagnation in British drama, redeemed by high-quality productions, with actors like Olivier, Gielgud and Richardson gracing the stage in revivals designed by Motley and photographed by Cecil Beaton. American musicals such as Oklahoma! and the plays of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller had a raw power and theatricality that was lacking in British theatre writing, while Giraudoux and Anouilh offered a Gallic intellectual stimulation absent from the home-grown product. There is some truth in this aesthetic judgement but it ignores crucial economic factors: new work often fails to attract audiences because of fear of the unknown, lack of bankable stars or critical hostility to experimentation. Revivals, stars and imports all carry with them some guarantee against economic failure: what has succeeded before can be expected to succeed again.

In the immediate post-war period of economic austerity in order to pay for World War II and the implementation of the welfare state, the economic situation fuelled managerial conservatism: theatre capacity was limited due to wartime destruction; production costs had risen and were rising massively; and plays were staying in theatres longer.

In a curious incident in The Apes of God (1930), Wyndham Lewis’s compendious satire on modern intellectual and artistic life, two of the central characters engage in a protracted tussle whose pretext is the fate of popular fiction since World War I. Amid the needling and jockeying for position, a thesis, expressed in a vehement tirade, begins to take shape. By the late 1920s the head of every ‘anglo-saxon adult’ had become stuffed with ‘drugged potions, sawed-off shot-guns, arsenic, hairbreadth escapes, blackmail, armed warders, King’s Messengers, pirates and crooks’. ‘From station-stall to smart hotel’, rich and poor alike were reading Edgar Wallace, whereas before and during ‘the Great Massacre’ only the upper class were captivated by such bloodthirsty ripping yarns – and certainly not ‘the young men’ who actually ‘fought the Boche’.

Was this view mere fiction? Lewis evidently did not think so, for only a few years earlier he had advanced a similar claim in The Art of Being Ruled (1926), his little-read political tract urging the ‘segregation of those who decide for the active, the intelligent life’ from the rest. As an inventory of the nation’s reading, Lewis’s argument both registers important truths – the growth of mass literacy, for example, or the uncomfortably close ties between the pre-war spy-thrillers such as those by William Le Queux and debates about national security – while simultaneously simplifying and distorting the structure of the popular-fiction market as a whole. Far from presenting a homogeneous profile, popular literature was becoming increasingly diverse and in many respects rather less conformist than he was ever able to recognise.

It is among the paradoxes of the lachrymose fiction that bedewed the eyes of novel readers in the later eighteenth century that the foremost exponents of the sentimental mode were also its most cogent detractors. The prime example is Henry Mackenzie, whose much-reprinted The Man of Feeling (1771), with its successors The Man of the World (1773) and Julia de Roubigné (1777), made him the most fashionable novelist of his day. With its trembling alertness to the minutiae of suffering and sympathy, and the plaintive silences of its fractured narrative form, The Man of Feeling is the exemplary sentimental text. Yet Mackenzie was to retire from novel writing in his early thirties, and in an essay of 1785 he gave systematic development to anxieties about sentimental fiction and its ethical basis that had already quietly haunted his three novels. Surveying the emergent subgenres of fiction, he detects in ‘that species called the Sentimental’ a dangerous subversion of its central claim: that by engaging readers' sympathies with misfortune, it could activate, as well as merely represent, ‘the most exalted benevolence’. Feeling had become an end in itself, narcissistically attentive to nothing more than its own exquisiteness. Deploring the inertia of ‘refined sentimentalists … who open their minds to impressions which never have any effect upon their conduct’, Mackenzie attributes to sentimental fiction a ‘separation of conscience from feeling’ which is, he adds, ‘a depravity of the most pernicious sort’. Even in its foremost examples, it cultivates nothing better than self-admiration, and disengages the will from forms of practical action that only less modish virtues – duty, principle – have the power to impel.

The most far-reaching changes in the character and self-understanding of British poetry in the post-war era were set in motion in the 1950s, with the advent of a group of writers who were quickly dubbed ‘The Movement’ – names include Philip Larkin, Donald Davie, Kingsley Amis, D. J. Enright, Robert Conquest, Elizabeth Jennings, John Holloway John Wain and Thorn Gunn. Despite the collective name, the Movement was only a loose affiliation of writers, and whatever sense of group identity and common purpose these writers shared in the 1950s largely dissolved as they pursued increasingly divergent paths in later decades. But the Movement remains crucial to recent literary history because in the 19505 the writers associated with it reimagined and promoted discourses of national identity in order to make of necessity (the reduced role of Britain in world politics) a virtue. This involved complex, sometimes contradictory and provisional adaptations of an argument that set an English poetry and a tradition of Englishness in poetry over and against cosmopolitan Modernisms identified as non-native - an opposition that is at the root of divisions in British poetry that continue to influence the production and critical evaluation of poetry in the present. From our retrospective position it is possible to see Modernist and anti-Modernist discourses in post-war England as existing in a symbiotic relationship; though too much focus on them can leave important middle ground neglected, the questions the Movement raised about Modernism are among the most important literary legacies of the 1950s.