We think of the post-war period as a rising time: rising standards of living, rising rates of literacy (fuelled by the guarantee of secondary state education until fifteen) and ‘The Rise of the Provincials’ – as it was called by Malcolm Bradbury – into the ranks of the cultural and intellectual elite. Most of all, the post-war period appears to us as the moment when capitalism finally hits its stride. It had promised, since its inception, steady progress towards a more prosperous, more secure, and – from the mid-nineteenth century onwards – fairer society. But the progress and the assurances were always upset by periodic catastrophes it seemed unable to escape: the great depressions of the 1870s and the 1930s, the brutal inter-capitalist wars that sprung up regularly from 1800 to the middle of the twentieth century, the revolutions and murderous counter-revolutions that punctured the self-image of civilised Europe.

From 1945 onwards, things were different. Keynesian economic policies used state expenditure to avoid dramatic economic crises; the welfare state’s panoply of new benefits and public institutions, by stealing socialism’s thunder, kept the lid on class conflict; and the twin facts of the Common Market and the domination of Europe by the Cold War ensured there would be no further inter-capitalist armed conflict. As a result of these arrangements, British social life acquired a distinctive rhythm and feel, which structured the sense of what social life was fundamentally like for three generations.

The internal chronology of British–Jewish literature extends back to the eighteenth century and is therefore difficult to incorporate into recent theories of multiculturalism which focus mainly on the post-war period. For this reason, British–Jewish writing is for the most part excluded from the received historiography of post-war literature in Britain. The widespread orthodoxy in the 1960s and 70s concerning the parochialism of British culture – having supposedly rejected the cosmopolitan Modernist tradition of the first half of the century – has led to the assumption that ‘new’ postcolonial literatures reinvigorated a moribund and hopelessly provincial national tradition. It is in these terms that the belief in the decline of the English novel has been related to the decline of British imperial power and a subsequent loss of a sense of national futurity. The historical longevity of British–Jewish writing, however, helps to qualify postcolonialism as a master signifier in relation to other minority literatures in post-war Britain. By overdetermining the supplementary role of ‘new’ immigrants to Britain’s shores, other histories of migration are either foreshortened or written out altogether. The black/white paradigm of literary multiculturalism – essentially non-white writers contributing to white culture – clearly down-plays other ‘comparative ethnic histories’.

It is in the context of this conventional literary historiography that an understanding of contemporary British–Jewish writing might prove to be a useful corrective. After all, East European Jews migrating to Britain were the object of the earliest anti-immigration and naturalisation acts in the first half of the twentieth century and this legislation was extended in each decade from the 1960s onwards.

Poetry of the later eighteenth century is ‘after Pope’ creatively as well as chronologically. Much of it imitates, alludes to or reacts against the great poet of the first half of the century. Given how controversial Pope was in his own age, from the early Essay on Criticism (1711) to the final Dunciad (1743), it is remarkable that his name occurs nearly as frequently in poetry of the second half of the century. Pope's influence extends nearly everywhere in the decades following his death, from the work of younger contemporaries such as Mary Leapor, Joseph Warton, Thomas Warton, Mary Jones, Mark Akenside and Thomas Gray, who published mainly in the 1740s and 1750s, to later poets publishing major works in the 1780s, such as William Cowper and George Crabbe. Writers of such strength as Samuel Johnson and Christopher Smart, who both wrote early verse indebted to Pope, may seem to have outgrown his influence. But it seems likely that the mature Johnson would have written more than two major verse satires had Pope not written so many, and that the oracular eccentricity of Smart's later style flows in part from a need to distance himself from the conversational urbanity Pope had perfected.

Characterising the period in other respects has proven more difficult, and arguably the study of its poetry has suffered as a result. Assumptions that the period is ‘burdened’ by ‘anxiety’, that it is the ‘Age of Sensibility’, or that its most important features are ‘pre-Romantic’ all present problems that go beyond terminology.

The period immediately following World War II is now well known for the migration to the United Kingdom of a large number of writers and artists from a fast-declining empire. Lured to the once-imperial metropolis to find publishers and a wider audience for their work, many were to have a major impact on the face of British writing as the century progressed. Yet, few attempts were made to include them in post-war accounts of British literary history. Moreover, the pigeonholes that were eventually set up either excluded them on grounds of race, placing them neatly in separate national traditions, or partially assimilated them as the ‘exotic’ flowers of what came by the 1960s to be known as ‘Commonwealth Literature’: a so-called wave of ‘new’ writings in English from previously colonised areas but which were frequently reduced by well-meaning liberal critics to simply derivative or mimicking branches of the main. There were, of course, several reasons for this. Not only had the critical temper of British writing become narrowly parochial (with a loss of interest in the cosmopolitanism characteristic of the Modernist movement earlier in the century), but it was still fuelled, even after Independence, by the lingering ideologies of a three-hundred-year imperial history, the divisive legacies of a manichean colonialist discourse which failed to accept that the formation of the nation was not only built on the culture of empire but also created by it. Domestic ideas of the national character had always been buoyed up by a process of exclusion, where what was British was defined in contradistinction to those it regarded to be the nation’s ‘others’, whether at home or abroad.

We have grown used to a way of telling the history. The 1950s, that decade of rationing, austerity, of dank deference and drab conformity, was replaced by the explosive energies of the 1960s, exuberant, experimental, enterprising. But this is History as Headlines: alliterative and casually associative. These or similar headlines can be glimpsed hovering over the cut-and-paste methods adopted by Martin Harrison, the curator of an exhibition mounted at the Barbican in 2002, TRANSITION: The London Art Scene in the Fifties. In the introductory essay to his splendid catalogue, Harrison reports the artist Richard Smith’s feeling that living and working through the fifties was analogous to a journey from darkness to light. Harrison’s exhibition becomes a step-by-step retracing of this journey. The first important painting is by David Bomberg, ‘Evening in the City of London’, painted in 1944, its slabs of red and umber, with the black of St Paul’s brooding in the background, eloquent of a city broken and burnt by Nazi incendiary bombs. The last painting is by David Hockney. ‘I’m in the Mood for Love’, executed in 1961, wittily plays with the image of a wolf on the prowl against a phantasmagoric New York skyline. Sexual intercourse is not far off. Moreover, Hockney’s work, while it undoubtedly owes something to Francis Bacon’s ways of slathering paint on canvas, points in a quite different direction. Hockney is making clear that his paintings are not, in Harrison’s words, ‘literal representation of fact’. Now meaning is to be found in the marks made on canvas.

Many key texts of the 1930s, written in grim foreknowledge of World War II, mapped Europe as a psycho-political space of Fascist manipulation, shifting borders and doomed voices demanding just representation before the axe fell. Travel writing, written in response to government appeasement policies, particularly after the failure of the Spanish Civil War and the tragedy of Czechoslovakia, became the key trope and genre for reports from the real and imaginary-future front.

In 1945, Evelyn Waugh distinguished between the innocent age of travel writing, the first half of the 1930s, and the political travel accounts of the run-up to the war. Travel had been a journey to the ‘wild lands where man has deserted his post’, or to the ‘soft breezes and mellow sunshine’ of the Mediterranean. But from 1935 onwards, as a war correspondent reporting on Abyssinia, Waugh took on ‘the livery of a new age’, no longer as ‘a free traveller’, but as a recruit in the political battleground over the future of Europe. This shift to the political was also played out in the many committed texts about journeys to the Spanish Civil War, a struggle eclipsing ‘the Spain that dwells in everyone’s imagination’. Its failure initiated a turn inwards in forms and genres of writing which became increasingly psychogeographical, neurotic, mythopoeic.

This shift can be registered even in the orthodox travel accounts that were still being written. Graham Greene’s Journey Without Maps (1936), an account of his journey to Liberia, is ostensibly a text in the old style, exploiting Liberia as screen for the projection of a Western dream of a primitive lost kingdom.

The period from 1660 to 1714 witnessed what might be called the birth of the modern English author. For it is during these years that there began to appear many of the features by which we define modern authorship: copyright legislation, widespread identification of the author on the title page, the ‘author by profession’, bookselling as a commercial enterprise, a literary ‘marketplace’, the periodical essay and political journalism. But it is important not to assume that the practice of authorship c. 1700 closely resembled the practice of authorship today, or even in 1800. Far from being an ‘independent’ man of letters, reflecting a highly individual sensibility, the typical author in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was enmeshed in an intricate web of social and political connections that not only defined a writer's working life but defined literary production itself. Most writing of the period was ‘occasional’ – prompted by some public event or controversy in the politics of church or state or the world of letters. Many writers in the early part of the period were aligned with a powerful courtier or minister – the Duke of Buckingham, the Duke of York, the Earl of Shaftesbury, the Duke of Monmouth, the Earl of Rochester – or hoped to be, so that they could attract the attention and encouragement of a patron. Even at the end of the period many writers attached themselves to Whig and Tory ministers, Lord Somers, Robert Harley, or the Earl of Halifax. Even those who did not take part in high politics were enmeshed in dense private networks.

Thus the first BBC Handbook characterised the relationship between ‘broadcasting and the composer’ in 1928 – the sixth year of the BBC's existence – burbling on to specify that music by ‘thoroughly “English” composers is always welcomed’. The challenge for the young BBC was to discover the right music with which to define its image, with which to broadcast, quite literally, its musical identity. And as part of that, the BBC sought a specific ally, a sort of composer-mentor who could adorn and distinguish the music programmes: a ‘thoroughly English’ composer with the right demeanour and a broadly recognised reputation, who wrote music with ‘a good, lilting tune’ and just the right kind of appeal – ‘distinctive without being modernish’. That was the challenge indeed.

The fledgling British Broadcasting Company was hugely ambitious, using its ever-increasing powers and financial base to negotiate ways to make a name and establish a reputation of national and international importance and influence. When founded in 1922 and placed in the hands of John Reith, it was a tiny organisation bounded by the current state of technology, with few employees, a small audience base consisting of amateur radio enthusiasts, no identity, and no direct remit with respect to output. But there was huge potential for this new mass-market medium – and, interestingly from a musical point of view, there were no expectations, conventions or traditions about how music on air might be shaped or what it might consist of.

In the post-war period, the popularity of genre fictions grew in all media. The period 1970–2000 saw a proliferation of genres beyond the standard four – detective, romance, science fiction and horror – to include the ‘blockbuster’, the ‘bonkbuster’, the family saga, the ‘sex and shopping’ novel, ‘chick-lit’, ‘new man’ and ‘lad’ fiction as well as a revival of the popular memoir and the elevation of certain children’s novels to bestselling status. Each of these was a distinct, if inevitably ephemeral, literary formation and each needs a proper contextualisation in terms of the moment of its emergence and decline. Despite a proliferation, and to some extent a hybridisation, of genres, the key popular forms of the late twentieth century remained the standard four. What follows offers a short history of those genres as well as of the key popular literary formations of the three decades. However, before embarking on a literary history of popular genre fiction in the last three decades of the century, it is useful to define just what an account of the recent, the fleeting and the contingent (to paraphrase Baudelaire) might entail.

For much of the century, literary criticism either did not think genre fiction worthy of discussion or simply ignored the vast mass of fiction bought by the reading public. By the end of the twentieth century two factors, the overwhelming dominance of the cultural industries that produced genre fictions in their hundreds and thousands (in all media) and the emergence of cultural studies in the UK and the USA, meant that even those institutions that formerly wished to bar the door had to recognise the force, if not always the significance, of popular fiction.

Personality-culture

Biography and autobiography have flourished in the last thirty years of the twentieth century. Both are stacked high in book shops and are among the books most borrowed from the public library. A glance at a current list of bestselling non-fiction reveals that six out often hardback bestsellers and eight out often paperback are either biography or autobiography. ‘Celebrity’ lives abound – the autobiographies of reformed villains and alcoholic footballers, rags to riches tales of pop stars or the scandalous accounts of high society (Andrew Morton’s biography of the Princess of Wales, Diana.: Her True Story sold millions worldwide after its publication in 1992); equally popular, however, are the painstakingly researched and weighty lives of writers and artists, scientists and politicians – ‘literary biographies’ – which together with the ‘literary memoir’ form part of what publishers now call ‘literary non-fiction’, a more elevated mix of specialist subject and trade publisher (among the surprise successes was Stella Tillyard’s Aristocrats,published in 1994, which followed the lives of the four Lennox sisters in late eighteenth-century England and Ireland, and Claire Tomalin’s Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self,which won the Whitbread Prize in 2001, and was a bestseller).

Not surprisingly, biographers are the first to claim the supremacy of their own sphere. Indeed, according to one of its main practitioners, Richard Holmes, literary biography is ‘arguably the most successful, and intellectually stimulating, literary form which has held a general readership in Britain’ since the 19605.

The epoch between the end of World War I and that of World War II is framed by two of the landmark prose satires of the century. However, while Wyndham Lewis’s Tarr (1918) is an uncompromising product of the Modernist avant-garde, George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1945) employs the traditional form of the fable to put across its complex critique of revolutionary socialism with almost populist clarity, the epitome, in every way (apart from its brevity) of all that High Modernism spurned. Other satires of note appeared in the interim, so although the 1918–45 period is most strikingly an era of ambitious rebuilding in Anglo-Irish fiction, with Joyce and Woolf as its leading architects, it is hardly less boldly a time of demolition (both of the certainties of the past and the enthusiasms of the present), with Lewis, Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh as its foremost iconoclasts. Moreover, although the type of social satire with which these three novelists are associated largely dies out by the mid-1930s (before resurfacing, mutatis mutandis, in the 1950s novels of Kingsley Amis and Angus Wilson), a satirical spirit pervades the period’s literature and is evident, for example, in Ulysses, Jacob’s Room, The Waste Land, Orlando, Finnegans Wake and Between the Acts. ‘Imuch doubt that any young person of our time can be impressed by a poem, a painting, or a piece of music that is not flavored with a dash of irony’, the cultural critic José Ortegay Gasset remarked in 1925.

The impact of cinema on early twentieth-century literary and, more broadly, cultural consciousness has, until recently, been neglected. Yet to look back at the period is to find that film consciousness was everywhere. In 1928, Kenneth Macpherson, co-editor of the avant-garde film journal Close Up, wrote: ‘The cinema has become so much a habit of thought and word and deed as to make it impossible to visualize modern consciousness without it.’ In the same year, the poet H. D. (Hilda Doolittle), a fellow contributor to Close Up, claimed that ‘the world of the film today […] is no longer the world of the film, it is the world […] There has never been, perhaps since the days of the Italian Renaissance, so great a “stirring” in the mind and soul of the world consciousness.’ She was writing here about ‘Russian Films’, but the promise of cinema was its internationalism, its creation of a visual language that transcended cultural and linguistic differences, and that, for H. D. as for many other early film enthusiasts, did not survive the transition to sound in the late 19205 and early 30s.

George Bernard Shaw also saw the birth of film as a cultural revolution. ‘The cinema’, he wrote in 1914,

In Boswell's Life of Johnson, under the year 1778, a reader comes across one of those Johnsonian outbursts that caused Boswell to compare his hero's temper to a warm West Indian climate. The context is entirely benign. Johnson has been discussing with the Quaker Mrs Knowles the nature of Christian friendship. Then, without warning, comes the explosion. ‘From this pleasing subject,’ reports Boswell, ‘he, I know not how or why, made a sudden transition to one upon which he was a violent aggressor; for he said, “I am willing to love all mankind, except an American:” and his inflammable corruption bursting into horrid fire, he “breathed out threatenings and slaughter;” calling them, “Rascals – Robbers – Pirates;” and exclaiming he'd “burn and destroy them.”’ When another lady present, Anna Seward, gently reproves his vehemence, the result is another explosion: ‘He was irritated still more by this delicate and keen reproach; and roared out another tremendous volley, which one might fancy could be heard across the Atlantick.’

Yet to any one who had read Johnson's Taxation No Tyranny, the most searching analysis of American claims produced by anyone writing on the side of George III and his ministers, the explosion would have come as no surprise. For by 1778 Johnson had honestly concluded that the American colonists were simply Englishmen long permitted by mere geographical accident to escape their normal civic responsibilities. They were now, in his view, hypocrites who were trying to make that advantage permanent by mobilising an exploded vocabulary of Whig principles left over from the previous reign.

To combine questions of ‘endism’, literature and technology is a particularly risky endeavour. There is always the chance of making the mistake of repeating the overheated millennial rhetoric of much 1990s cultural theory on these issues. Having survived the millennium bug, the armfuls of handbooks on cyborgs and how to become posthuman, and sullenly acknowledged (despite what Jean Baudrillard promised) that the year 2000 really did take place, there is still the lure of that minatory discourse on the ‘fate’ of literature in this end-time. To be dragged into the noisy declamations of the prophets of the end or new beginning of the book is to lose critical distance just when it is most needed. Then again, precisely how is distance to be attained when it is evident that the Third Industrial Revolution – the digital one – is still only just starting to unfold? The history of technology is littered with unpredictable trajectories and wholly unforeseen applications, and given the accelerated cycles of technological innovation and obsolescence, the transience of current forms of digital technology is always painfully clear. Speed of change is something that, as Leo Marx has observed, encourages technological determinism, a mode of thought that ‘invests technologies with enough power to drive history’. With all these risks, any claim to authoritative statement can often seem to be just a symptom of the technoculture it had hoped to master.‘Increasingly’, Friedrich Kittler claims, ‘data flows once confined to books and later to records and films are disappearing into black holes and boxes that, as artificial intelligences, are bidding us farewell on their way to nameless high commands.

Whatever Elgar actually said concerning ‘absolute music’ in his Birmingham lecture on Brahms's Symphony No. 3, and whatever he actually meant to say, to view his own symphonies and concertos as ‘purely tonal pattern-weaving’, to use Ernest Newman's phrase, would be to deny an essential – perhaps the essential – aspect of one's experience of them. A more productive approach is to see these works as ‘fixing’ by means of a highly sophisticated compositional technique a series of emotional states or attitudes, these being bound up to a large extent with aspects of the composer's own life. Various comments by Elgar confirm – or, at the very least, suggest – that this is the case. Indeed, both the Violin Concerto and Symphony No. 2 have prefatory inscriptions that point to extra-musical impulses, their enigmatic nature increasing the listener's desire to search for ‘meaning’. Meanwhile it could be said that Falstaff, described by the composer as a ‘symphonic study’, differs chiefly to the extent that the subject-matter is precisely identified and specific events illustrated. What follows is an interpretation of Elgar's later orchestral music (the works already mentioned, plus the Cello Concerto and Anthony Payne's elaboration of the sketches for Symphony No. 3) that pivots around what this particular author perceives to be its emotional meaning, but argued from observations about technique intended to provide snapshots of Elgar's symphonic approach.