Hegel’s designation of America as ‘the land of the future’ has been echoed by the conspicuous ‘Americanocentrism’ of Postmodernism – in Fredric Jameson’s words, the ‘the first specifically North American global style’. This marks a reversal of imperial fortunes. Where once the literary forms of the British Empire (the novel paramount among them) had been disseminated across the Anglophone world as so many instruction manuals for bourgeois subjectivity, now the ‘frivolous’ forms of US culture are eroding the last of those underpinnings of the Victorian era, and helping to establish a decentred, consumerist subjectivity. This feature of Postmodernism is one reason why there have been so few British defenders of that aesthetic, and why titles such as The Illusions of Postmodernism, What’s Wrong with Postmodernism and Against Postmodernism characterise British contributions to the debate. Yet a sober assessment of the facts is not necessarily apologia; and we will conclude this chapter with a quick discussion of the irresistible economics of that same ‘cultural imperialism’ as it literally swallowed up British publishing in the late twentieth century.

There is at any rate the sense that Postmodernism came to the United Kingdom as a pre-packaged phenomenon. Whereas the likes of Pynchon, Barthelme, Coover and Gass had launched a literary campaign against an imposing international style, the British Postmodernists had not only the American example, but also the rising tide of continental theory before them. The two ‘posts’ (-Modernism and -Structuralism) were, by the late 1970s, achieved realities, and, since both took the act of writing particularly seriously, served as convenient bulwarks whence to assail the literary establishment.

Ursula Brangwen in the laboratory

In his multi-generational novel The Rainbow (1915), D. H. Lawrence shows his early twentieth-century heroine Ursula Brangwen as a biology student at Nottingham university college. During her final year of study Ursula has a conversation with a woman doctor of physics, Dr Frankstone, a materialist who believes that there is no special mystery to life. Life is simply a ‘complexity of physical and chemical activities, of the same order as the activities we already know in science’. As scientific research continues, there is no reason why we should not come to know everything. But the conversation ends on a note of uncertainty – Dr Frankstone is, after all, only restating the conventional outlook of nineteenth-century scientific Positivism – and Ursula, for one, is not convinced.

Positivism has been defined as ‘a collection of prohibitions concerning human knowledge, intended to confine the name “knowledge” or “science” to the results of those operations that are observable in the evolution of the modern sciences of nature’. There is, then, a distinct circularity involved in the claim that we can come to know everything through scientific research, since science itself has been allowed to prescribe what counts as knowledge. Dr Frankstone is speaking for the so-called ‘classical’ Victorian physics, which would be fundamentally challenged in the early twentieth century by Einsteinian relativity, quantum theory and Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle. Classical physics derives from Newton, but in the late nineteenth century its most influential figure was Lord Kelvin, whose Laws of Thermodynamics had led to a conception of the physical universe in which everything could be charted and everything was predictable.

As the first Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, this volume has a difficult brief. The last century has yet to compose itself definitively as a ‘period’, and our volume has to reckon with the fact that the concluding phases of the century will often prompt provisional comment rather than a sense of summative closure. The volume also covers a period in which questions of history and nation are particularly volatile, and while taking its place in an extended series of literary histories, recognises that for its precursors ‘English’ has generally been a less contentious term than it is now. In this History, ‘Englishness’ is not merely a given attribute of the literature under discussion, but a cultural condition in which complex questions of identity and location are constantly at stake.

It is also important to note here that the volume is intended as a history rather than as a Companion or as an anthology of essays on the period. In that sense it reflects a particular self-consciousness in the period itself about historical change and the changing relation of cultural forms. The History thus recognises the claims for cultural innovation and modernisation that characterise the beginning of the period at the same time as it attends analytically to the more profound patterns of continuity and development which avant-garde tendencies characteristically underplay. Along with this tension between change and continuity – and perhaps another version of it – is the troubled relation of internationalist perspectives to nationalist ones.

Central to a popular understanding of Elgar's solitary, autodidactic world – one that accentuated his isolation from Britain's musical establishment – has been a narrative that heightened the significance of his roots in ‘trade’, his Roman Catholicism, his lack of a university education, his struggle for recognition (when others of lesser ability were apparently enjoying greater attention), and his own pejorative and often bitter remarks about the music of his native colleagues. Matters have not been assisted by the prejudicial assumptions of Shaw in 1920 who, through his hostility towards academia, chose to venerate Elgar at the expense of the ‘little clique of musicians, who, with the late Hubert Parry as its centre, stood for British music thirty-five years ago’. It was a statement refuted with some vigour by Elgar himself who clearly retained an admiration for Parry. Such polarised and entrenched views had taken root some time earlier. Ernest Walker, a descendant of the ‘Oxford School’ of criticism (which included Parry and Hadow), devoted an equal amount of space in his A History of English Music of 1907 to ‘the trio of composers [Parry, Stanford, Elgar] who stand by common consent at the head of modern English music’, and quietly denounced Elgar's ‘hot-house type of emotionalism’, his ‘forced pseudo-impressiveness’, and a tendency to allow colour to hide content. This was a view endorsed by Edward J. Dent, Professor of Music at Cambridge and a one-time Stanford pupil, whose cursory treatment of Elgar (in favour of Parry and Stanford) in his essay ‘Engländer’ for Guido Adler's Handbuch der Musikgeschichte in 1930 epitomised an academic scorn for Elgar's music.

Jürgen Habermas' influential model of the rise of public opinion as a force in the state argues that ‘[a] public sphere that functioned in the political realm arose first in Great Britain at the turn of the eighteenth century’ when, with the end of censorship, ‘a press devoted to the debate of political issues developed out of the pamphlet’. The principle of universal access is central to Habermas' thesis about the emergence (as opposed to the structural transformation) of the bourgeois public sphere. ‘A public sphere from which specific groups would be eo ipso excluded was less than merely incomplete’, he explains, ‘it was not a public sphere at all.’ As it consists of ‘private persons come together as a public’, the public sphere, in its appeal to reason as a governing principle, is in a crucial sense disinterested.

The period from the later seventeenth to the middle of the eighteenth centuries has been described, quite rightly, as ‘the first age of party’. This inevitably presents problems for a thesis in which ‘rational-critical’ debate is posited as being somehow free from party-political (or any other) considerations. On the contrary, it is clear that politicians immediately appreciated the possibilities presented by the existence of a free press for influencing parliamentary as well as public opinion. While Edmund Burke was drafting Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents (1770), he received a letter from the Marquis of Rockingham:

Systems of periodisation promise a means of creating useful boundaries and categories of materials to be analysed, but they also contain inherent problems in relation to the processes of analysing those materials. This is especially the case with the period in question, traditionally seen by theatre historians as one in which mainstream drama did not generally reflect social change but, rather, pandered to middle-class tastes and sensibilities. The inter-war theatre industry was made up of a number of interdependent sectors, however, just as the middle classes themselves were widely defined and in a period of social transition. There were clear shifts and developments in the theatre industry and, as a consequence, in the kinds of plays being produced. However, these shifts and developments, although precipitated by it, had already been set in motion before World War I. The growth of the middle classes during the late nineteenth century, the increase in leisure time and the changed social attitudes to theatre and drama as a means of education and social cohesion are as influential upon the developments in British theatre and drama after World War I as are the extraordinary changes in the economic factors controlling the industry as a whole. The theatre of the period, ‘reflected many divergent trends and tendencies, and the impact of a number of individuals. It resists simplification.’ Many of the theatre critics of the period, highly idiosyncratic and class-conscious as much of their work is, clearly identify the economics of the theatre industry (rises in rent, the formation of management cartels) and a ‘new’ middle-class audience – often identified implicitly as lower-middle-class – as influencing the kinds of plays that the newly all-powerful managements were prepared to put on.

International interest in Elgar's music has enjoyed a general revival following the performance and recordings of his Third Symphony, properly entitled ‘the sketches for Symphony No. 3 elaborated by Anthony Payne’. When permission was granted by the family for Payne to make his work public, understanding and perception of Elgar was permanently altered. Hitherto it was assumed that the death of Alice Elgar in 1920 had suppressed his creative urge, a view supported by the relatively small-scale works of his last decade, and their dependence on earlier sketches. It appears, however, that he was sufficiently restored not only to contemplate an opera (The Spanish Lady) and a new symphony, but to reach a stage in composing the latter from which a complete score could be elaborated – obviously not identical to what Elgar would have written, but rich in ideas and deeply moving in performance. And if both symphony and opera depended in part on earlier sketches, research into Elgar's compositional methods shows that to be true of many, if not all, his greatest works (see chapters 4 and 5).

In fact the level of interest in Elgar among musicians, including musical scholars, was already high. Elgar has never been long out of public view, at least in Britain, where his music is a fixture at the Last Night of the Proms. The Jacqueline du Pré phenomenon, in which a young artist working with a senior conductor (Sir John Barbirolli) presented the cello concerto unforgettably, seemed to recreate the history of Elgar recording his violin concerto with the young Yehudi Menuhin; but we should not forget that the concerto was in the repertoire of senior cellists such as Paul Tortelier. One of the most encouraging features of recent years has been the interest taken in Elgar by conductors, scholars, and audiences from, for example, Russia, Germany, Japan, and the United States.

Broadcasting was just as responsible as cinema, if not more so, for opening up the established theatrical tradition to mass audiences, firstly on radio as what J. C. Trewin dubbed ‘the National Theatre of the Air’, then on television as potentially ‘The Largest Theatre in the World’, in Shaun Sutton’s famous phrase. Simultaneously, drama also underwent its own radical transformation within these new media. They served not just to revitalise older genres, but to open genuinely new creative possibilities for dramatic form. It is the leading contours of such innovations and their evolving social and cultural significance which this essay endeavours to sketch.

By 1945 BBC radio had built up a listenership with the necessary habits and skills to broadcast some four hundred plays annually, in addition to ‘microphone serials’, Dick Barton Special Agent becoming the most popular. Of broadcast genres, serialisation and the series are arguably the most distinctive, with television developing radio’s pattern. Radio’s principal narrative and ‘textural’ techniques, genres and methods were pioneered in pre-war drama and features by ‘producer–directors’ and writers such as Lance Sieveking, Tyrone Guthrie, Olive Shapley and D. G. Bridson. These developed a ‘radiophonic’ space–time fluidity comparable to cinema’s, through montage, association or superimposition of acoustic images, by fade-ups/outs, ‘dissolves’ and so on, cross-cutting between locations for simultaneity and dramatic contrast, breaking down conventional scenes into ‘shots’, ‘zooms’ and ‘close-ups’. Radio’s ‘basic grammar’ borrowed terminology from film, music and psychology as much as the stage.

The accession of George III to the throne of Great Britain in 1760 inaugurated a tumultuous new era in the country's politics. A succession of political crises agitated the nation, from the Wilkite disturbances of the 1760s and the American War of Independence to the impeachment of Warren Hastings and the ideological challenge of the French Revolution. The Wilkite controversy was sparked by the government's attempts to prosecute and silence John Wilkes, a radical member of parliament who had dared, in his newspaper The North Briton, to criticise the king directly in print. The political campaign against Hastings was motivated by allegations that, as head of the East India Company, he had grossly abused his position of power, enriching himself and his underlings at the expense of the people of India.

These political struggles inspired a formidable literature of political controversy. In the press, such eminent writers as Samuel Johnson, the pseudonymous Junius, Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin (among many others) placed their literary talents in the service of political polemic. In parliament the issues of the day elicited from members of both Houses speeches of such distinction that the latter part of the eighteenth century has come to be called the golden age of British parliamentary and forensic oratory. Opposition members, in particular, acquired a reputation for oratorical brilliance, most notably Edmund Burke, Charles James Fox and Richard Brinsley Sheridan. But in his mastery of contemporary political eloquence, Burke was widely conceded to be primus inter pares. No one else dominated quite like him all the available avenues and modes of political discourse, both in the press and in parliament.

At the chaotic intersection of English popular and print cultures stands Hogarth's magnificent female hawker, anchoring The Idle 'Prentice Executed at Tyburn (1747), the eleventh plate of a didactic moral history engraved in a consciously unpolished style and priced to appeal to an apprentice class at the crossroads of virtue and pleasure:

In this description, written in 1763, Hogarth fairly sums up the complex of instruction, entertainment, ostensible simplicity and affordable prices that had characterised the production and marketing of popular literature and drama for the previous hundred years. Of course, simplicity of intention in no way guaranteed simplicity of result, and in the hawker and her surroundings we find the abundant paradoxes linking official or commercial productions and popular responses to them: a legal demonstration of terror and control results in a chaotic festival fuelled by irreverence and gin; a printed ‘Last Dying Speech’ makes a marketable celebrity of a condemned man who has yet to speak; a ragged, dirty female carrying a child at the periphery of the crowd becomes a central symbol for popular print culture as she cries a minatory publication she probably cannot read to a socially mixed audience who will buy it more for entertainment than instruction.

The Restoration introduced remarkable changes to a book trade erratically regulated by the state but now driven by vast commercial opportunity. Escalating consumer demand spurred renewed attempts by government and the Stationers' Company to control the location and number of printing presses and the subject of publication. As the money economy deepened and prices stabilised, foodstuffs became relatively cheaper. Increased disposable income boosted the demand for non-essential and luxury goods. Prominent among the luxuries were books and print. The transformation of the literary market that followed was distinguished by bitter struggles within the trade but also by an extraordinary range of products, producers, circulation methods and literary intermediaries. During the next century the changes notably advanced the publication of religious guidebooks, novels, periodical reviews, magazines, daily, weekly and country-town newspapers, dictionaries and etiquette books. The market supported unprecedentedly famous booksellers and authors, the first library societies and commercial circulating libraries, literary reviewers, and finer distinctions between popular, polite and elite forms of literature, their suppliers and consumers.

Parliamentary renewal of the Printing Acts (also known as the licensing laws) lasted, with interruptions, until 1695, while the creation of a Licenser (superseding the Stationers' Company as a de facto censor) did not effectively outlive the appointment of Roger L'Estrange (serving from 1663 until the Revolution of 1688). Thereafter, existing legislation against libel and blasphemy offered ministers and judges last-resort controls that were also capable of extension during times of political crisis. Successive Printing Acts, restricting printing to London, Oxford, Cambridge and York, protected Stationers' Company rights and properties and thus served as a government quid quo pro for the assistance of the Company in identifying clandestine and potentially seditious printing.

At a Shrove Tuesday party in 1785, Robert Burns first heard ‘When I upon thy Bosom Lean’, a song by the local, Ayrshire poet, John Lapraik. He wrote at once to congratulate the author, but his verse letter, subsequently published as ‘Epistle to J. L*****K, An Old Scotch Bard’ is far more than a friendly tribute to a fellow poet. As Burns recreates his response to Lapraik's song, he takes the opportunity to express a sense of pride in the larger, shared culture of his native Scotland, while at the same time registering his sharp sense of the dilemmas facing contemporary poets whose familiar language and forms were different from those regarded as standard and acceptable by the period's influential men of letters. The contradictions inherent in prevailing aesthetic attitudes meet in Burns' poem, which is at once a celebration of local tradition and a manifestation of the complicated relationship between Scottish and English culture.

‘We should have done well, I think, to be satisfied with the aspect of peace’, Virginia Woolf wrote from Richmond on 12 November 1918, describing the grey, wet day that met the armistice of World War I with weary solemnity. Arriving in London, however, the euphoria of the loud and drunken crowds carousing in the rain struck her as nervy and strained. ‘There was no centre, no form for all this wandering emotion to take’, she noted, ‘in everyone’s mind the same restlessness and inability to settle down, & yet discontent with whatever it was possible to do.’ For those who had survived the conflict, jubilation would quickly give way to a growing sense of dislocation and indeterminacy. The confident Edwardian world that had approached war in 1914 had by now dissolved into myth, and, surveying its ruins, modern society faced a crisis of belief and identity.

The disintegration of nineteenth-century assumptions of progress, order and the stability of self and nationhood had, of course, been heralded well before. In the years immediately prior to the conflict, the avant-garde movements of Futurism, Imagism and Vorticism were vociferous in proclaiming their determined dissociation from the past, condemning the enervating effect of bourgeois tradition and rejecting historical consciousness for the immediacy of the modern. Recalling the creative energy of the London literary scene of the time in his memoir Return to Yesterday, for example, Ford Madox Ford depicts the young artist ‘D.Z.’ (a caricature of Wyndham Lewis), exultingly announcing to the older writer: ‘Finished! Exploded! Done for! Blasted in fact.’

Thomas Parnell's lines about the pastoral world take us to the heart of an age-old problem. ‘Oft have I read’, he begins, ‘that Innocence retreats / Where cooling streams salute the summer Seats; / Singing at ease she roves the field of flowers / Or safe with shepherds lies among the bowers …’ Having passed through a country fair, however, he had found ‘No Strephon nor Dorinda’, but a motley crew of randy, idle and drunken rustics:

Where is pastoral innocence to be found? And how can any modern writer not view Arcadia ironically? By a shift of focus typical of early eighteenth-century satire, the sheep move centre-stage: the incidentals of pastoral become the guardians of its soul. The poet is self-consciously listening to his own bland rhetoric (‘the Virtues which adorn the plain’, etc.) before the final rueful comment emerges – conclusive, yet almost in parenthesis, as if he is turning away from the scene. After two thousand years of pastoral poetry Parnell (d. 1718) can find only one unsullied image remaining, and there seems no more to be said.

Elgar's historical reputation has rested on his large-scale orchestral music. Through the success of the ‘Enigma’ Variations and the First Symphony in particular, he was seen as the first British composer to have created symphonic music of international scale and importance. Similarly, his last major orchestral work, the Cello Concerto, has often been heard as a retrospective farewell to the whole legacy of nineteenth-century Romantic music – in Michael Kennedy's evocative phrase, ‘music of wood smoke and autumn bonfires, of the evening of life’. While Elgar's choral works have likewise achieved canonic status in the modern repertoire, and the variations and the symphonies belong to the most elevated genre of Austro-German absolute music, Elgar's chamber music and works for strings occupy a more ambivalent historical position. Though the chamber music engages with a venerable tradition of serious instrumental works, Elgar's contribution has sometimes seemed conservative or backward-looking, especially alongside his dynamic work in the modern symphonic field. His works for string orchestra occupy a separate generic category, one that has tended to equate lightness of scoring with lack of musical depth (compare the rhetorical weight of a serenade as opposed to a symphony). But this view is not universally held. For many, Elgar's chamber works offer a vivid summing-up of his life's musical experience. Similarly, among Elgar's varied works for string ensemble, one outstanding masterpiece, the Introduction and Allegro, has had a catalysing influence on later English string music. In this sense, among others, Elgar’s chamber music and works for strings are central to any assessment of his compositional output.

Almost all ‘histories’ of eighteenth-century English drama have focussed on the new plays. This is a natural and in some ways defensible way to proceed, but ‘new plays’ are a product of the theatre system inwhich they are produced, and any attempt to treat them in glorious isolation must inevitably produce fallacious and misleading results. New plays did not beget one another, and neither were they necessarily a major influence on their immediate successors. Between 1730 and 1790 something like 85 per cent of the mainpiece performances in London were of old plays – many of them several decades old or more. New plays tended to be written as vehicles for the principal performers, and consequently the parts those performers took in stock plays had a major influence on the new works written for them. Innovation was rarely a desideratum; neither was literary merit a prime concern. Whatever critics of the time had to say, plays served primarily as popular entertainment.

To comprehend eighteenth-century drama as it was written and experienced in its own day, one must start by realising three things. First, only a few of the plays have ever received attention from twentieth-century critics, and most of those plays are atypical. Second, a performance did not consist of one comedy or tragedy viewed in decorous silence. People came, wandered about and left; those who stayed bought refreshments and talked. Many of the mainpieces were not comedy or tragedy but musical. Most nights included an afterpiece as well as a mainpiece, and a great many nights featured interpolated entertainments of various sorts – song, dance, spectacle.

Like literature itself, literary criticism has its fashions – its fads and caprices and strange gleamings – all of which can shed an instructive light on intellectual history and indeed life itself. Surely no literary-historical phenomenon has undergone a more sweeping critical re-evaluation over the past one hundred years than the late eighteenth-century vogue for the ‘Gothic’ – that exorbitant hankering after horror, gloom and supernatural grotesquerie so palpable in Britain in the literature and art of the 1790s especially. Long disparaged as one of the more regrettable, even absurd episodes in English literary history, the so-called ‘Gothic Revival’ of the later eighteenth century has in recent decades come to be seen as one of the signal aesthetic manifestations of the age – as a phenomenon both fascinating in its own right and crucial to a proper understanding of eighteenth-century art and culture more generally

Literary critics of the early decades of the twentieth century, contriving to establish the moral and intellectual gravity of their enterprise, had little patience with Gothic whimsy and extravagance. The Gothic craze has always been easy to satirize, of course: Jane Austen's delightfully irreverent Northanger Abbey, composed in the mid 1790s, when the vogue for the emotionally supercharged ‘tale of terror’ was at its height, provided the pattern for a host of later comic spoofs and burlesques. Most early twentieth-century scholars, eager to enter the lists against vulgarity (past and present) and the excesses of popular taste, took the great novelist's cue more or less reflexively. If Gothic fiction was to be discussed at all, it was hardly something to be taken very seriously.