In A Sentimental Journey (1768), Laurence Sterne reflects upon ‘how many a foul step the Inquisitive Traveller has measured to see sights and look into discoveries; all which, as Sancho Panza said to Don Quixote, they might have seen dry-shod at home’ and pointedly asks, ‘Where then, my dear countrymen, are you going?’ ‘To all corners of the globe,’ a contemporary might well have replied; and indeed, by 1768 there were few distant climes that had not been sighted, explored, traded with, taken possession of, catalogued or written about by British travellers, who seemed to have little interest in remaining ‘dry-shod at home’ when they could experience first-hand both the pleasures and the ‘travails’ (a word closely linked to, and often interchangeable with, ‘travel’ during this period) of journeying abroad. The chief European destinations were France and Italy, countries that (despite their negative political and religious associations) possessed a particular cultural cachet for the affluent on the Grand Tour – the best known of the many (including increasingly middle-class) forms of European travel at the time. It is thus a fitting irony that Sterne's admonishments against foreign travel occur while he himself is preparing for a trip to Europe, and that what follows is an account of his journey through France.

That the term ‘tourist’ gained currency in the latter part of the century is, then, hardly coincidental. The word appears several times, for example, in the diaries of John Byng, its usage typified by his insistence on ‘drag[ging] forth’ a fatigued travelling companion because, as he wryly notes, ‘we must move about as tourists’. The self-consciousness reflected in this remark, of being a clearly identifiable figure defined by the act of touring and expected to behave in particular ways as a result of this adopted role, pervades much of eighteenth-century travel literature, assuming an especially risible form in Arthur Young’s remark, in his famous tour of France (1787–9), on the traveller’s tendency to be upon the full silly gape’ in the search for novelty, even in circumstances in which it is ridiculous to look for it’ – as if Parisians, not being English, would be walking on their heads’.

It might seem odd that, in the 1920s, some thought Elgar unrepresentative of British music; there is no doubt that he had been held as supremely British – or at least English – during the Edwardian era, and he was to become regarded thus again. But this exception does go some way to prove the rule that no music is essentially intrinsic to any nationality: certain traits may become associated with nationhood, as much by the composer as by the audience, but these associations are just as provisional as any other connotations music might hold. To Ponsonby's generation, Vaughan Williams and his generation had tapped the roots of Englishness by rediscovering the folk repertory and returning to the idioms of the Tudor and Elizabethan eras. Elgar's idiom lacked this purity, perhaps even representing the false imperial optimism that lay at the roots of the Great War; moreover, Elgar did not have the luxury of erasing his Germanic musical roots – as the royal family had managed to do with its dynastic title.

‘If we had nothing but Elgars, then there might be an end to conservatories, and our theory teachers might lose their entire earnings.’ Thus wrote not an irate member of Britain's musical establishment but an admiring German critic, Max Hehemann, one of several early twentieth-century German musicians to write articles about Elgar in musical periodicals. The period of German interest in Elgar in the years immediately following the successful Düsseldorf performances of The Dream of Gerontius in 1901 and 1902 was relatively brief: as Michael Kennedy has observed, Elgar came ‘at the end of an epoch in European music, at the dawn of a renaissance in England’, with the result that he soon ‘ceased to exercise the European musician's curiosity’. But soon is not immediately: in this short period Elgar's works received an acclaim outside Britain they have not known since. The criticism that exists therefore offers us valuable insights into Elgar at a time when the composer was at his creative peak, but from outside British musical society, and thus from outside the cultural-political battleground of the British musical renaissance within which the critical discourse on Elgar's music took place. Consequently, we can examine afresh the commonly held idea of Elgar as a musical embodiment of ‘Englishness’, not least the extent to which the composer's Englishness was perceived as compatible with his Catholicism. Before doing so, however, we must first become acquainted with the critics themselves.

It has become something of a truism to observe that Modernism emerged in tension both with the forces of modernisation and tendencies in social, economic and political modernity. The example of London was to bear this out, especially through the complex cultural and political sea-change of World War I. By 1920 Ezra Pound had given up on London and had already drafted the Hell Cantos which took London as their subject. Ford Madox Ford retreated after the war to the country and thence to Paris and the USA. Lewis went underground, then shifted to the USA and Canada. Only Eliot of the canonic men of 1914 found ways to negotiate the post-war conservatism which had driven others from the capital. This antagonism between Modernist culture and modern metropolitan society was an expression of relations between the individual artist and the social mass, new regimens of work, and the apparatuses of mass production and consumption, but it was expressed in another way, too, by London’s relation to the cities positioned historically, geographically and mythologically either side of it.

Paris, the ‘capital of the nineteenth century’, was in this scheme of things a city of European sophistication and advanced artistic culture; New York, on the other hand, was a brazen emblem of the new, the coming city of the twentieth century, and already in the 1900s an emerging finance capital and model of consumerism whose cultural life, at least in the eyes of its expatriate artists, was at best embryonic.

‘Elgar Brothers’, the music shop at 10 High Street, Worcester, became a mounting embarrassment to Elgar as his composing confidence increased and he aspired to a higher social position. Retail trade might have been acceptable as background to his Helen Weaver engagement. But there were rumours also of a connection with Sarah-Anne Wilkinson Newholme made while staying with Dr Charles Buck in Yorkshire, then of an attempted engagement to Gertrude Walker, musical daughter of the rector and squire at Abbots Norton, with whom Elgar shared many a concert platform, and who went on to breed dogs and become local secretary of the British Shakespeare Society. Above all there was Alice Roberts, a major-general's daughter born in India, whose social concerns in her early writings became rather, after her marriage to Elgar on 8 May 1889, a determination to raise her composer husband out of the sphere he was born in. Occasionally Elgar's mother might visit the home of the couple; occasionally the father would be summoned to tend a piano; but there is no record of the parents being invited together. To anticipate the Gerontius premiere, F. G. Edwards of the Musical Times planned a major article on Elgar. Alice Elgar, in a letter to Edwards of 18 September 1900, put her foot down firmly on certain matters, and notably the ‘shop’; ‘Then as E. has nothing to do with the business in Worcester would you please leave out details which do not affect him&with which he has nothing to do – His interests being quite unconnected with business.’

The 1990s saw the rise and rise of Postcolonial studies. Writers like Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy and Zadie Smith became bestselling authors, while most university English departments energetically addressed the discourse known as Postcolonial theory in their undergraduate degrees. This ascendancy reflected the burgeoning growth in quantity and cultural importance of Anglophone literatures from countries other than Britain in the second half of the twentieth century that challenged the construction of the ‘English literary canon’. The somewhat moribund areas of academic literary study previously known as ‘Commonwealth Studies’, ‘New Literatures in English’, ‘World Literature in English’, were revivified as ‘Postcolonial Literatures’.

Yet even as new life was breathed into this body of academic study, debates occurred about whether this was in fact a homogeneous ‘body’ of study. Although the term ‘Postcolonial’ has become the most widely accepted designation for this group of literatures, an extended and sophisticated debate about the usefulness of even the term ‘Postcolonial’ has emerged in the last decades of the century. ‘Postcolonial’ might at first appear to be a ‘period specific’ designation, namely to refer to literature written after colonialism when nations gained their independence from colonising powers, usually from the 1950s onwards. However, this has been recognised as a problematic periodisation, since it fails to take into account the fact that even after independence, literatures from such countries still manifested the effects of ‘neo-colonialism’, or the lingering vestigial cultural remains of the imperial/colonial powers with all their negative and positive effects.

Literary history has not been kind to British poetry of the late seventeenth and eighteenth century, far preferring poems of the periods just before and after. The reasons are many, having at least as much to do with subsequent patterns of taste as with the poetry itself. But the poetry does have features that make it seem especially difficult or odd to readers of later times, especially those with post-romantic ideas of what poetry is or should be. Despite Romantic claims to have reformed poetry along democratic lines (claims that did open up important new topics and directions, but that also ultimately narrowed what was considered ‘poetic’), poetry before the Romantics was open to wider uses and was more varied in topic and tone. Poetry then was more inclusive in several ways: treated a greater variety of subjects, used a larger range of voices and styles, aspired to more cultural uses and aimed at more diverse, less self-chosen audiences. As Joseph Trapp (Professor of Poetry at Oxford University) observed in a series of early eighteenth-century lectures, poetry's scope properly involved ‘every Being in Nature, and every object of the Imagination’.

Poetry regularly invaded all forms of discourse and performed many kinds of services later restricted to prose: philosophical argument, for example, and didactic and utilitarian guides for ordinary life and activity. No subject was considered truly unpoetic; the range was from panegyric to invective and from delicacy and admiration to horror and gross disgust, from raucous and bawdy comedy to solemn high-mindedness.

As Edward Elgar's compositions for imperial ceremonies and the First World War have specific functions (royal celebrations, marching music, rallying cries, and charitable offerings), they can be considered together within an analysis. The compositions share a number of characteristics: none is abstract in nature, Elgar composed many of them to sound specifically ‘popular’, and none can claim ‘secret’ or ‘hidden’ meanings, like the ‘Enigma’ Variations or the Violin Concerto. In the period before the war, these compositions solidified Elgar's reputation as an important national figure. During the war, they aptly represented the complex difficulties individual Britons faced from the violence and carnage of battle. After the war, they placed Elgar in the forefront of society as an official ceremonial figure. They allowed him to represent a musical tradition rapidly declining throughout elite Great Britain, but prominent in middle-class quarters. These works were inspirational in their own time, and many are still rousing today. As important examples of period pieces, they show Elgar transcending the limits of concert music to successfully negotiate popular forms.

Throughout this chapter, ‘popular’ describes music that might be easily disseminated, might be performed in non-elite contexts and venues (bandstands, rallies, music-halls, the London Coliseum, etc.), or might have been written by Elgar to garner a broad audience. A close analogy to this type of composition would be Beethoven's Wellingtons Sieg (or ‘Battle Symphony’), a potboiler meant to capture timely sentiment. Elgar often designed his ‘functional’ music to be popular through concentrating on broad styles of composition, including singable melody as opposed to motivic transformation.

One of the most vivid literary descriptions of World War II occurs at the end of Evelyn Waugh’s Vile Bodies, which was published in 1930. If this seems a bit premature, it should be noted that prescient British observers had been predicting another war at least since the publication of John Maynard Keynes’s Economic Consequences of the Peace ten years earlier. Keynes had warned that, unless the peace terms extracted from Germany at Versailles were adjusted, there would be another war, ‘before which the horrors of the late German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilization and the progress of our generation’. This conviction of the utter ruin to be brought by another war grew over the next two decades, until it became widely assumed that the next war would mean the virtual collapse of civilisation in the UK, beginning with the physical destruction of British cities. Alexander Korda’s 1935 film version of H. G. Wells’s Things to Come gave a vivid and influential visual form to the assumption that another war would be fought primarily from the air by bombers whose penetration of civil defence perimeters was virtually assured. One military calculation predicted 600,000 civilian dead and 1.2 million wounded in the first six months of aerial bombardment. The use of gas in such attacks would mean, as Waugh has it in 1930, a civilian population going to bed each night in gas masks.

Three hundred years after Dryden's death nothing could be more obvious than the breadth and authority of his career. He is the most important poet of the late seventeenth century. He perfected the heroic couplet and deployed the idioms of literary mockery with unprecedented skill and originality; he wrote masterful Pindarics (metrically varied odes, so called after the Greek poet, Pindar) and beautiful commemorative verse; he wrote the greatest political satire of the language; and he absorbed and translated the idioms of Latin poetry over an entire lifetime, creating an English Virgil that for some, even now, has no rival. If we add Dryden's work as playwright and literary theorist to his accomplishments as poet and translator, we might wonder if there is, in the early modern period, another career so various and fecund. Dryden invented, perhaps not quite from whole cloth, the heroic drama; together with Purcell he fashioned an English opera; after Sidney's Defence (1595), Dryden's Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668) is the defining text of the early modern literary imagination. And no one – not Milton or Marvell, not Browne or Burton, not even Clarendon – could touch the subtlety, the mastery and the ironies of Dryden's prose.

Yet the retrospective view – from the beginning of the twenty-first century, or indeed from the late 1690s, back over four decades of tremendous literary industry – gives a kind of logic to this literary life that would have been difficult to see as it was under construction, a coherence that belies how little was or could have been planned, how much was opportune and adventitious.

It is the run-up to Christmas 2001. A community centre in Homerton, in the East End of London, is hosting a series of acts by a range of performing artists. A man in a beard and long coat steps into the empty space. His extended arm begins slowly to trace a wide arc. In his hand he holds a small sleigh. Behind him there appears a projection of the twin towers in New York. The traditional image of Christmas blurs with the more recent image of another event, the terrorist attack of 11 September. Santa’s sleigh flies on.

Was this performance political? It touched a hot political topic, but did it take a position on it? Did it need to? Could it remain playful and enigmatic and yet be political? Was its effectiveness dwarfed by the thing it referred to? What precisely was the relationship between this piece of theatre and the politics of the event? Is that relationship political?

As he surveyed the contemporary scene in 1982, the playwright David Edgar was clear about the connection of theatre and politics. He defined it as ‘the project of explaining public events in a privatized way’. The key word perhaps is ‘explaining’. So, for example, John Arden and Margaretta d’Arcy’s Island of the Mighty from 1972 could be said to use the story of Arthur’s reign in the sixth century to explain what life in the modern UK felt like.

Robert Crawford has argued that ‘Scotland needs not the pursuit of some elusive echt-Scottishness, but requires many reminders of its protean and plural past, present and future.’ Indeed, in literary and cultural terms, Scotland during the last three decades of the twentieth century has increasingly found a series of ‘usable’ pasts and presents as it has divested itself of a former desire for an organic unity in national identity; one that rested on an over-wrought perception of the country’s ever fragmenting history within the context of a hopelessly marginalising British superstate. In creative literature, as elsewhere, this liberation from the aggrieved pursuit of an ideally coherent nation has resulted in a much greater inclusiveness of the various historical and cultural component parts of ‘Scottishness’ and an experimentation that can be both suitably iconoclastic and re-evaluative.

One of the most striking voices to emerge since the first publication of his work in 1968 is that of Tom Leonard who sounds a mischievously scandalising note in his poster-poem, ‘Makars’ Society’: ‘GRAN’ MEETIN’ THE NIGHT TAE DECIDE THE SPELLIN’ O’ THIS POSTER’. Leonard is one of a group of writers who have brought Glasgow and the west of Scotland to the centre of the Scottish literary stage for the first time in any critical mass. Leonard, Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Liz Lochhead and others formed enduring personal associations in creative writing seminars run by Philip Hobsbaum, the English poet and academic, who was already well known as a supporter of ‘regional’ writing in Ulster when he arrived to work at the University of Glasgow.

The histories published between 1660 and 1780 include some of the most compelling and dazzling narrative performances in British literature. Historical writing occupied a central place in British culture throughout this period, and its prestige was, if anything, enhanced rather than diminished by its unprecedented commercial success. By the later part of the century, the genre (or, it might more accurately be said, family of genres) of history was widely recommended to readers of all ages and both sexes as a source of political instruction, moral insight, social awareness and imaginative diversion. History was regarded, without qualification, as a branch of literature. This is not to say that writers or readers of history were unaware of or indifferent to the boundary between fact and fiction; simply that they did not feel that the artistic crafting of narrative was fundamentally at odds with its presentation of historical truth. In respect of its self-assured literariness, its generic stability and its prestige, history stands out, in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as a peculiarly conservative genre in an era of radical literary experimentation and change. While novels and poems were steadily transformed and reinvented during this period, narrative history underwent a process of consolidation. Dynamic and innovative in its adoption of new subject matters and methodologies, this kind of history remained broadly resistant to formal experimentation. The era of Clarendon, Hume, Robertson, Catharine Macaulay and Gibbon, can thus paradoxically be said to represent an extraordinary expansion of the possibilities of traditional historical genre which was nevertheless at odds with the ‘novelisation’ of many other aspects of British literary culture.

Alexander Pope secretly arranged the publication of his own heavily manipulated letters in 1735. Lord Chesterfield employed letters to provide advice to his illegitimate son, advice that, in published form, supplied a conduct book for succeeding generations. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu gained posthumous fame by evoking life in Turkey through a series of letters published immediately after her death; James Boswell acquired early notoriety for his frivolous epistolary exchanges with another young man, published shortly after they were written. Thomas Gray's letters and William Cowper's were published, at least in part, for wide readerships soon after they died, and a selection of Horace Walpole's correspondence, chosen by him, appeared the year after his death. The familiar letters of travellers, literary celebrities and public wits attracted increasing audiences as the eighteenth century progressed in Britain. Well-codified generic rules often shaped their production. Letter-writing manuals had proliferated for several centuries, establishing public conventions for personal utterance. Yet, reading eighteenth-century correspondences from a chronological distance of more than two centuries, one can note diversity rather than conformity, feel the vigour of individual personality and marvel at the range of self-representation.

Liminalities and paradoxes mark personal letters in published form. Such letters poise between the public and the private: emanations of a solitary self, yet incomplete without an external reader; expressing the thoughts and feelings of an individual, yet couched partly in conventional terms; written for one particular other, but read by numerous originally unimaginable others; declaring authenticity but marked by artifice. Eighteenth-century interest in such paradoxes of private and public may be suggested by the proliferation of ostensible letters serving ostensibly public purposes.

America's distinctive relation to the Great War originated in its remoteness from the event itself. Both because thousands of miles of ocean lay between the US and the battle in Europe, and because American troops did not participate in major action until the last year of hostilities, the First World War remained a virtual phenomenon to many US residents. The reports of German-Austrian aggression and Belgian-French imperilment did not lack for urgency (there were even German purposes to thwart closer to home, in Mexico and the Caribbean), but they did lack for immediacy. The American side of the Great War necessarily relied on institutions of representation - journalism, print propaganda, fiction, sermons - to make the war real in the place where it was not occurring. In important respects, American writing of the war was the war.

In the years before President Wilson abandoned the nation’s policy ofneutrality and gained a declaration of war from Congress in April of 1917,the American public speculated about European statecraft, debated developmentsthat might draw the US into the hostilities, and imagined the horrificnew technologies of modern warfare like poison gas, massive artilleryshelling, trench combat, and airplanes used as weapons.

This short extract from E. S. Caley's “The Foreman and the Manager,” a parody of Lewis Carroll's “The Walrus and the Carpenter,”raises many issues central to women's war writing and the feminist scholarship that has brought both women's experience of the war years and their considerable body of writings on the war to public attention since the 1980s. Published in a munitions factory newspaper, the poem is about male responses to the huge impact of the war on gender roles. The Foreman, according to Claire A. Culleton, who discusses this poem in her rich account of women and working-class culture, has recognized the need for women's labor and is lecturing the manager of a munitions factory on the need to begin instructing the new female workforce. Culleton tells us that munitions workers numbered 900,000 of the nearly 3,000,000 women employed in British factories by the end of the war. Another 2,000,000 “worked in the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry, the Women's Land Army, the Volunteer Aid Detachment, and other paramilitary organizations,” working both at home and in the war zone, albeit not as combatants. Women's mass entry into previously male jobs fundamentally challenged the period's dominant assumptions about women's capacities and proper role in the home. Even though women were forced out of these jobs at the end of the war, their experience of “Screws and Shells and Overalls” marked British twentieth-century society and contributed to women's economic, social, and sexual emancipation.