‘On or about December 1910, human character changed.’ Virginia Woolf’s famous formulation has always conveniently served to mark the beginning of real Modernism in England, separating it from the more tentative anticipations of the Edwardian era. But Woolf was pointing also to a more general social change, visible to her, for example, in the friendly insubordination of domestic servants. The contemporary cook would be ‘in and out of the drawing room… to borrow the Daily Herald’. Insubordination of various kinds, amounting to a militant unwillingness to know one’s place and stay in it, was by 1914 to bring Britain to the brink of civil war in Ireland, and to the brink of a possible revolution, triggered by a likely general strike in the same year. The House of Commons showed its own lack of subordination to the Lords by passing the Parliament Act in 1911, after two general elections caused by the Lords’ obstructiveness after the ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909. Henceforth the upper house had no power to alter money bills, and its right to veto other bills was restricted to two successive sessions of Parliament. But Parliament no longer commanded much respect. Woolf’s cook would have found in the Daily Herald she borrowed from her employer that parliamentary debates were reported under the heading ‘The House of Pretence’. The Herald was founded in 1911, aimed at the working-class; part of Woolf’s point about change was that it was the mistress of the household who subscribed to this working-class paper.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (before the advent of film) it was not unusual for theatrical productions to be accompanied by elaborate musical scores. Although it accounts for only a small part of Elgar's output, his contribution to the tradition was nevertheless creatively significant. Any study of Elgar's theatre music should focus principally on The Starlight Express, his finest theatre piece, and by far the longest. He said it was the kind of piece he had waited a generation to set. But it must more generally be a study of his musical concerns c.1914–18, the period in which he wrote six of the ten theatre pieces, and the end of his modernist period of composition from In the South to Falstaff. Yet one cannot account for it all along those lines.

Peacetime potboilers

Initially, Elgar hoped his theatre music would provide a captive audience on which to try ideas for more serious works, as well as to raise money. His first commission (in 1901) was for incidental music for the play Diarmuid and Grania, a collaboration between George Moore and W. B. Yeats. (Elgar modernised the title to Grania and Diarmid). After the play's run, Moore pestered Elgar with grander projects: ‘The sooner you begin writing the [Grania] opera the better[:] the subject evidently suits you.’ But Elgar did not bite, nor did he care whether the play was revived.

‘As swimmers into cleanness leaping’: the image in which Rupert Brooke projected the high aims of early autumn 1914 remains vivid in cultural memory, among other reasons, for the profound irony it affords in historical retrospect. To greet the hideous futility of four years of trench warfare as a cleansing pleasance of late summer? The gesture magnetises our attention in the same way that the impact of an accident seems to be caught most powerfully when, looking back, we see an expression of unsuspecting happiness immediately preceding it. Just so, however, the pattern of contrast that Brooke forms might be dismissed as a heuristic, really just a useful fallacy, insofar as it allows us to feel a meaning in history that may not be borne out by the facts. As any detailed account of English political and cultural history will indicate, the years preceding the outbreak of the Great War resist assimilation to that myth of the ‘Golden Summer of 1914’. In The Strange Death of Liberal England,for instance, George Dangerfield proposes that the war, far from shaking the foundations of English society, actually helped to preserve the status quo by diverting the energies of a social revolution being threatened by the workers’ and women’s movements, not to speak of the steadily escalating menace in Ireland. The ‘Golden Summer’ theory may be met with equal scepticism when it is applied to literary history: the decorous measures that Brooke presents in his exemplary instance of Georgian poetics were being countered as a prevailing standard, most notably by an increasingly robust avant-garde –a term that signals a militarisation of culture already under way avant-guerre.

Hard to bear is the poignancy of loss induced by so many once living kinds of music separated by time and change, imprisoned in obsolete genres or superseded beliefs and practices. Manifestly important music, sometimes supremely great, is cut off from roots deep-nourished in a context of social, civic, or religious usage, to be preserved in artificial surroundings, most notably the technically flawless CD. Somewhere along this shadow-line of defunctive music lie the pre-Gerontius choral works with orchestra by Elgar. Aquick glance at the lists on the back of old Novello vocal scores of their hardcore staples (mainly Handel) suffices to reveal the extended wasteland, once teeming with life, of the Victorian oratorio. Elgar's compositional growth is firmly grounded in this copious provincial choral culture. His earlier cantatas make a determined bid to join it, his later to raise and enhance it; taken together they cover almost his entire composing life, which coincides with English choral culture at its apogee.

While the two last oratorios have never quite gained the safe mainstream, Gerontius is unbudgeable. And in more general terms his reputation has never stood higher in all the years since its first peak in the twentieth century's first decade. But the pre-Gerontius pieces, for the most part clear milestones on a great composer's path to prime-of-life powers, none utterly negligible, some patently inspired, are largely neglected. That they have all been recorded goes to endorse my opening remarks: this is exhumation, not living repertory, available anywhere but in the concert hall where it belongs.

‘Women are writing, and the air is heavy with expectation: What will they write that is new?’ The expectations to which Kristeva refers in her seminal essay ‘Women’s Time’ (1981) are the subject of this chapter. The inauguration of ‘women’s time’ had begun a decade before, but Kristeva saw that the time had also come to reflect upon some of the more metaphysical, as well as political, implications of women’s entry into historical temporality. By 1981, the Women’s Liberation Movement had splintered into a bewildering diversity of identity politics around issues of race, sexuality and class, but feminist writing had changed for all time the political and literary landscape. The burning issue thrown up by this maelstrom, however, was the question of what it is to be a woman and what is meant by women’s writing. In the same year, 1981, Elaine Showalter’s essay ‘Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness’ tempered Kristeva’s utopian sense of expectation in suggesting that women’s writing has always been, and will remain, essentially double-voiced: inevitably an articulation of both the muted and the dominant, the old and the new. Moreover, she implied that feminist re-visioning (to use Adrienne Rich’s term) will require both an impulse towards, and resistance to, the concept of the feminine, to identity as woman. Showalter’s essay performatively demonstrates her own undecidability. Proceeding in sections, each headed by citations from literary mothers, dead and alive, her argument develops in a mode of textual parallax, woven through and striated by a female chorus whose ghostly voices beckon towards unity and solidarity and simultaneously threaten to break into cacophony and difference.

If a stranger had asked Elgar ‘How do you compose?’ they would be very lucky to have received a reasoned answer. More likely, they might have been met with a curt rebuff or a tirade of banter. Yet Elgar might have responded more seriously to the question if he felt that the person was genuinely sympathetic to his own personality as well as to his music. Fortunately, we do not have to rely on anecdotes to answer this question. Instead, we have a plethora of documentary manuscript materials: sketchbooks, working sketches, short scores, full scores and sets of corrected proofs from which we can follow the creative habits of his entire life and gain invaluable perspectives on his stylistic growth from juvenilia to maturity. However, there have been some losses, as his daughter Carice noted when he moved from Severn House, Hampstead in July 1921, just over a year after the death of Lady Elgar: ‘Very busy day – turning out stationery cupboard – Father went through all his sketches MSS etc. sad work. Destroyed much & got it all in order. He spent a second day at the task.’

Elgar's manuscripts are not the only answer to our initial question: he was not alone among the composers of his age, nor since, who are conveniently labelled ‘Romantic’ on account of their sincere indebtedness to the stimuli they received from environments and literature. It was to Robert J. Buckley that Elgar revealed the early importance of environment:

The years between 1945 and 1970 saw a significant increase in public funding for the arts. The Arts Council, the British Council, the British Film Institute and local authorities all invested increasingly in forms of creative production. This process of investment generated a series of complex questions about the relations between cultures and identities, with artists being asked to address an increasingly recalcitrant set of relationships between nation, region and metropolis. In order to capture the particular role of literature in this fraught engagement with questions of region, nation and identity, this chapter will begin with a discussion of the larger economic, political and cultural forces that made devolution such a pressing issue between 1945 and 1970. It will then consider the ways in which the cultural meanings of regionalism were theorised by key cultural figures of that period. Following an analysis of the role of cultural institutions in the creation and development of regional cultures, it will conclude with an analysis of specific aspects of literary production in Scotland, in Northern Ireland, in Wales and in English regions. In each case the aim will be to reach an understanding of the ways in which the literary imagination can respond to the linguistic and formal challenges of a reconfigured geographical and cultural identity.

This reconfiguration was characterised by Tom Nairn, in his reflection on the reinvigorated nationalisms operating within Britain since the war, as ‘The Break-Up of Britain’. Nairn argued that the movement towards devolution in this period was intimately connected to ‘the long-term, irreversible degeneration of the Anglo-British state’.

The modern roots of Decadence were in 1830s American Gothic and late Romanticism. Edgar Allan Poe elevated disease, perversity and decay to new heights of artistic expression. Alfred Tennyson’s Poems of 1832, the poems of languor rather than of politics – ‘The Lady of Shalott’, ‘The Lotus-Eaters’ and ‘The Palace of Art’ – evoked a philosophy of Inaction that would later be elaborated in Oscar Wilde’s Intentions (1891) and in the American Ralph Cram’s The Decadent: The Gospel of Inaction (1893). Although Poe’s success in the United States was trivial until he was discovered by Charles Baudelaire, his perversity and Tennyson’s celebrity – in the words of the latter’s Ulysses ‘I am become a name’ – were the two touchstones of Decadence: the naturalistic uniqueness of the individual psyche and the recognition of ‘brand’ or personal commodification that would be central to modern consciousness. Baudelaire took up the first in Les Fleurs du Mal, censored by the French state in 1857, and the latter in the figure of the Dandy in The Painter of Modern Life (1863). Baudelaire began translating Poe (culminating in 5 volumes) in 1848, and thereby turned from Romantic nature to urban perspectives and personalities. His successor, Stephane Mallarmé, known as the founder of French Symbolism, took up objects as well, and infused them with non-material properties as a counter to a too-materialistic age.

In his ‘Further Notes on Edgar Poe’ (1857), Baudelaire reappropriated the intentionally negative phrase of his critics, ‘a literature of decadence’, in a revolutionary, affirmative way to describe a literary progress (ironically parodying the great theme of the age) from infancy, through childhood and adolescence, towards a mature Decadence.

The size and nature of Elgar's recorded legacy

Elgar first went into a recording studio in January 1914 at the age of fifty-six. In the next twenty years he was to take part in more than fifty recording sessions and leave behind him a recorded legacy of more than fifteen hours as an orchestral conductor.

His earlier recordings, those up to 1925, about a third of the total, were made by means of the acoustic process. In an orchestral acoustic recording session you would have seen thirty or forty men huddled together in front of one or two or occasionally three recording ‘horns’ sticking out from the wall, capturing the sounds. There would be only a handful of violinists, perhaps six in all, and probably only a single cellist, who would be mounted on a platform which could be moved back and forth, nearer or further away from the recording device. The flutes and clarinets and oboes would be sitting immediately behind the small body of strings, but if the first flute or the first clarinet had a solo, he – invariably he – would stand up and gingerly but quickly make his way through the strings and lean forward within a few inches of the mouth of the horn. Bassoonists would often be seated opposite the violinists with the horn players mounted on platforms high behind them with their backs to the conductor so that the bells of their instruments were directed at the recording horns.

Wales is a small country, with two linguistic cultures, which, as a nation, has survived into the third millennium by the skin of its teeth. About a quarter of its 2.75 million inhabitants – only 5 per cent of the UK population as a whole – were not born in Wales, and accordingly are unlikely to have a strong sense of allegiance to it. While two-thirds of Scots identify themselves as Scottish as opposed to British, in a 1999 survey only 43 per cent of Welsh respondents saw themselves as Welsh first and foremost. Apart from a brief period of industrial prosperity during the early years of the twentieth century, it has remained one of the poorest areas in the UK, its household incomes at 10 per cent below those of the UK generally, and its output per head, in terms of GDP, currently standing at about 82 per cent of the UK average. Since its Anglo-Norman conquest in the thirteenth century, it has had few national institutions to mark its distinctiveness, apart from an indigenous language in steep decline during the twentieth century: the figures for Welsh-language speakers dropped from 54.4 per cent of the Welsh population in 1891 to 18.7 per cent in 1991. The long struggle to save the language from extinction in itself causes internal division in Wales, with some of the non-Welsh speaking majority seeing little purpose in spending scarce resources on keeping alive a culture they have already lost.

A new form of entertainment on the market: the novels of amorous intrigue

In the seventeenth century, first on the Continent and then in England, a modest new form of print entertainment appeared, but it seems to have taken its readers by storm. It was called ‘the novel’, and was viewed by contemporaries like Aphra Behn, William Congreve and Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz as a symptom of a ‘novel’ turn in modern taste. This novel was short (compared to romance), written in prose rather than poetry, usually took sex and/or love as its topic and was usually set in the present rather than in some earlier ancient or legendary era. The most successful English writers of novels between 1683 and 1740 were Aphra Behn, Delariviere Manley and Eliza Haywood. Their success came from their development of a specific type of novel, the novel of amorous intrigue, designed to appeal to readers in the burgeoning English market in printed books. But these novels of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century have been an embarrassment to most of the English literary history of the novel written since the late eighteenth century. Intent upon legitimatising the novel as a form of literature, literary histories of the novel written in the many years between Clara Reeve's Progress of Romance (1785) and Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (1957) have laboured to efface the centrality of the enormously popular novels of amorous intrigue. By doing so, most literary history has obscured the productive symbiosis between this early type of English fiction, and those narratives written by the three canonical authors usually installed in the position of the fathers of the English novel: Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding.

The Restoration theatre, while in many ways a new creation, maintained important continuities with pre-1642 practice. The indoor playhouse lit by candlelight and charging high prices had existed since Shakespeare's time. Perspective scenery had been used in Caroline court masques and in D'Avenant's interregnum entertainments. Although the Elizabethan thrust stage (out into the audience space) was abandoned, acting took place in front of the proscenium arch, not behind it as in present-day scenic theatres. Actors still had to be the ‘servants’ of some powerful person: the King's Company, who were regarded as legal successors to the earlier King's Men, belonged to the royal household and the Duke's Company to that of the king's brother, James, Duke of York. Caroline models of censorship were restored, with the Master of the Revels required to approve scripts for performance and the Surveyor of the Press those for printing. Elements of the old actor–sharer system were in evidence as late as 1695 with the brilliant Lincoln's Inn Fields troupe. What then had changed? The most momentous innovation was the restriction of trade to no more than two companies at any one time, which was undertaken to protect the large investments in buildings and scenery and the steep rise in manpower necessary to meet raised audience expectations. The King's Company patentee, Thomas Killigrew, boasted to Pepys that the stage was ‘now by his pains a thousand times better and more glorious then ever heretofore’. The new roofed theatres were handsome, brick constructions, employing the continental technology of illusionism based on wing-and-shutter scenery (that is, painted canvas backgrounds and borders run on from the sides) and the use of machines.

Life-writing in the twentieth century’s era of experiment and modernity has demonstrated that there is still life in its forms. The culture industries have found them persistently lucrative. Lives of royals, generals, politicians and other performers endure on the bestseller lists. Educationalists and clerics may have given way to sports and media ‘personalities’, but the investment in the biographic remains massive. The ‘biopic’ emerged as a staple of the film industry in this period. There is enough biographical documentary to programme a Biography Channel for television.

This continued proliferation of the producing and consuming of auto/biography isn’t reducible to a single grand narrative of shifts and developments. In part this is because the genres of life-writing are less well-researched than plays, poems or novels – though they have begun to attract more critical attention in the last two decades. But also because, just as realism has flourished in fiction and film alongside and despite other forms (Absurdist, Existentialist, magic realist, supernaturalist, metafictional, Postmodernist), so fundamentally realist biography and autobiography have flourished among more experimental forms of life-writing. This diversity of forms (what we might call ‘auto/biodiversity’) is arguably part of the condition of postmodernity. How we got there is perhaps best explained in terms of a sequence of challenges – from history, from criticism – to the received forms: challenges which have in turn produced new forms of life-writing and new modes of understanding the genres involved, and generated a new terminology.

‘Modernity’ is a relatively new term in literary scholarship on the turn of the twentieth century. Sociologists organise their research around issues of ‘modernisation’ unique to this period: the Taylorisation of industrial production, the professionalisation of science and the organisation of the modern research university, the development of new mediums and media for both mass transportation and mass communication, and the impact on the conceptualisation of a public sphere of women’s and non-whites’ advocacy for an extension of the rights of citizenship to previously excluded populations. Sociologists focus as well on the ‘dramatic transformations of worldviews and philosophies’ encompassed by the still broader term ‘modernity’ (290). By contrast, literary scholars typically have mapped late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history in terms of a neat, clean and emphatically teleological succession of literary movements, charting a ‘progress’ from realism to either naturalism or aestheticism and Decadence and then to Modernism. Rather than entertaining the possibility that these aesthetic modes can exist simultaneously in the same text, or that they were produced and marketed for different audiences throughout this period, the emphasis until quite recently has been placed on literary Modernism’s success in ‘extricat[ing] itself and our epoch from the fin de siècle’. That is to say, artists and literary critics claiming Modernism to be the aesthetic of modernity first established its position front-and-centre in the cultural landscape by putting other aesthetic paradigms either ‘behind’ it or ‘below’ it (or both).

In the post-war world, it is the late sixties and seventies which give birth to much of what we recognise as contemporary culture: a commodified counterculture; identity politics; the celebration of popular culture and its recycling of materials; suspicion of authority and political process. The turbulent decade of the seventies is marked by a release and dissemination of energies which have their origins in the political rebellions of the sixties, and by a move towards culture itself as the ground of debate and resistance. This was a move reinforced theoretically by the ‘New Left’ with its emphasis on culture, increasingly broadly denned, as a site of contestation, and a shift towards notions of hegemony and false consciousness derived from Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser, rather than the ‘Old Left’ emphasis on class, labour and dialectics. The period also sees the rise of the discourse of Postmodernism itself as an analytic framework for contemporary historical faultlines.

At the same time, the seventies is a decade we associate with a number of cultural problems: kitsch, nostalgia, violence, paranoia and the origins of the radical conservatism of the eighties. Three strands will be highlighted in what follows: the anxiety associated with notions of cultural and personal freedom; the question of the representation of history when history’s narratives seem to have been corrupted; and the issue of identity politics. The discussion will move fairly freely between a postmodernising American context which, in retrospect, seems to set the scene for cultural shifts elsewhere, and a British context in which a troubled sense of post-Suez shock, economic decline, and historical and geographical inheritance informs literature in distinctive ways.

In Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey Catherine Morland and her friend Isabella share a mutual passion for reading novels in spite of the fact that ‘no species of composition has been so much decried’. When caught reading a novel, a typical young lady of the period, we are told, might blurt out in embarrassment, ‘Oh! It is only a novel!’ quickly putting it aside: ‘It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda.’ Yet in defence of the genre, Austen's narrator remarks that a novel is ‘only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour are conveyed to the world in the best-chosen language’. Until recently literary scholars, rather than assenting to Austen's ironic appreciation of Frances Burney and Maria Edgeworth, have sometimes shared the young woman's attitude of ‘affected indifference, or momentary shame’ in taking pleasure in novel reading. In spite of critical reticence, recent attention to eighteenth-century women authors and readers has transformed the understanding of the English novel in the mid and late eighteenth century. Widely read by their contemporaries, these women and others like them had largely been lost to the literary history of the first half of the twentieth century. In fact, women novelists, except for Burney and Austen, were omitted from consideration in the previous edition of The Cambridge History of English Literature.

‘That is the penalty of my English environment.’ So Edward Elgar replied to Frederick Delius, who had just opined that he ‘thought it was a great pity that [Elgar] had wasted so much time and energy in writing those long-winded oratorios’. Elgar was visiting Delius at his home in Grez-sur-Loing on 30 May 1933, just before conducting the French premiere of his Violin Concerto. Delius, a fervent disciple of Nietzsche, despised any music Associated with organised religion; he once remarked to his amanuensis Eric Fenby that Elgar ‘might have been a great composer if he had thrown all that religious paraphernalia overboard. Gerontius is a nauseating work, and, of course, tremendously influenced by Parsifal.’

Assuming that Delius, who was as a rule brutally frank, did report Elgar's reply accurately, a question arises immediately: why did Elgar thus casually dismiss The Dream of Gerontius, The Apostles, and The Kingdom as penance imposed upon him by his environment? Even if offered in courtesy or in jest, Elgar's remark constitutes a shocking, almost Petrine, threefold denial. This appears to repudiate the oratorios, belittle the loyalty of the English listeners who supported his career, and leave Christian faith out of the question entirely. Even for such a tortured personality, riven by lacerating self-doubt and envy, Elgar's denial seems at first inexplicable. To understand the forces that motivated Elgar's renunciation of the three great oratorios and shaped their creation in the first place, one must first attend Elgar's deathbed. This chapter will place those oratorios within a cultural, historical and aesthetic perspective so as to illuminate not only their position within Elgar’s oeuvre, but also the ambivalent attitudes of their creator towards religious belief, society and aesthetics.