Any discussion of the role of technology in popular music should begin with a simple premise: without electronic technology, popular music in the twenty-first century is unthinkable. As a point of departure, however, such a premise demands that one develop an understanding of music technology as more than a random collection of instruments, recording and playback devices. Technology is also an environment in which we experience and think about music; it is a set of practices in which we engage in making and listening to musical sounds; and it is an element in the discourses that we use in sharing and evaluating our experiences, defining, in the process, what music is and can be. In this sense, the ensemble of electronic devices that are used to make, distribute and experience contemporary music are not simply a technical ‘means’ through which we experience music. Technology has become a ‘mode’ of music production and consumption: that is, technology has become a precondition for music-making, an important element in the definition of musical sound and style, and a catalyst for musical change (Blacking 1977). However, technology does not simply determine music-making. Pop artists and consumers have often used technology in ways unintended by those who manufacture it. In this way, pop practices constantly redefine music technologies through unexpected or alternative uses.

In 1978, the sociologist Richard Peterson suggested that American popular music was on the verge of its third great revolution of the twentieth century. The first two revolutions, Peterson (1978) claimed, had been ushered in by jazz and rock. The beginnings of the third were to be glimpsed in the rise of disco music, which made dance clubs a powerful force in popularising new records. As Peterson made this prediction, disco records sat atop sales charts in Europe and North America, and the disco film Saturday Night Fever was on its way to becoming a major box-office success. Two years later, when much of disco culture appeared to have collapsed, Peterson's prediction would look like an embarrassing miscalculation. It would take twenty more years, shifts in terminology, and a whole set of technological, social and economic developments before his claim of a dance music ‘revolution’ seemed worth re-considering. In 1997, commemorative books and anniversary dance parties celebrated a decade of frantic dance music activity in Great Britain and Western Europe, amid signs that even white North American youth, long faithful to rock, were migrating towards dance clubs and the sounds of dance music.

The second edition of The Faerie Queene was published in 1596. It contained three new books which dealt with the virtues of friendship, justice and courtesy. The ending of the 1590 first edition of the poem was altered so that Amoret and Scudamour were not reunited in a hermaphroditic embrace at the conclusion of Book III. Instead their story ceases to be a tale of private heterosexual bliss and becomes part of a wider focus on love as a social and public force. As in Book III, Scudamour suffers mixed fortunes in war and is afflicted by horrible jealousy, but he eventually manages to lead Amoret away from the Temple of Venus, albeit without the obvious triumph of the ending to the first edition. Amoret, who has been participating in a civilised and modest discussion of love's virtues (reminiscent of Castiglione's Book of the Courtier) is terrified at Scudamour's approach. He is criticised by the figure of Womanhood for 'being overbold' (IV, X, 54), words that explicitly recall the motto over the door of the inner chamber in the House of Busyrane that Britomart should 'Be not too bold' (III, xi, 54).1 Scudamour has taken on the role of the traditional Petrarchan lover. He displays his shield to Amoret 'On which when Cupid with his killing bow / And cruell shafts emblazond she beheld, / At sight thereof she was with terror queld, / And said no more.' In seizing her hand and forcibly removing her from the Temple of Venus he sees her as a 'warie Hynd within the weedie soyle', boasting that 'no intreatie would forgoe so glorious spoyle' (IV, X, 55).

What does it mean to write the life and times of a major writer in the era of poststructuralist literary theory? What it doesn't mean, of course, is to contrast the current situation with some pretheoretical paradise in which the exercise would have been unproblematic. The fact is that the study of literature is by definition theoretical; it is simply that the terms of the debate differ between then and now. An example of how one method challenges another can be seen by glancing at the impact of new, or practical criticism, on two of the favorite kinds of Dickens studies from earlier in the century. Prototype studies attempted to identify the “real” human beings behind Dickens’s characters, while topographical studies sought to identify the “real” places which formed the inspiration for the settings of Dickens’s novels. New criticism, which flourished as a movement in the 1950s and 1960s, sought to remove literary texts from the historical arena through a concentration on their structure and language, and so was committed to a rejection of this implied equation of art and reality. This approach was superseded by new kinds of theory which problematized, among other matters, the existence of an external reality without the experience of the observer as subject and suggested that the author was now dead, as a challenge to the traditional role of the artist as creator of fictional worlds which mirrored both external reality and the writer’s personal life. But whatever the differences between new criticism and poststructuralist literary theory, they do have one thing in common in their stress on the primacy of language. Contemporary theory has, of course, taken this position further by way of the concept of textuality, the notion that the individual and the world, as well as the literary artifact, are written; that is, are inscriptions of those ideological formations which are the distinguishing features of major historical epochs.

Edmund Spenser is England's first great pastoral poet. In 1579, at about the age of twenty-seven, Spenser inaugurated his literary career by publishing The Shepheardes Calender, a collection of twelve pastoral eclogues each named after a month of the year. The poet began with pastoral in imitation of Virgil, who had published his Eclogues before his didactic poem, the Georgics, and then his epic, the Aeneid. In late antiquity, Suetonius, Donatus and Servius all understood Virgil's career model to be identical with his life pattern, as reported in his epitaph: 'Mantua gave birth to me, the Calabrians snatched me away … Isang of pastures, fields, and princes.'During the Middle Ages, John of Garland accommodated the progressive life-career pattern to a circular cosmic image, the rota Virgilii (Wheel of Virgil), which presents a series of concentric circles divided by three spokes, each demarcating a writing style, a life style, a social rank and corresponding imagery (plant, animal, implement) (fig. I).

In the sixteenth century, Spenser was thus able to understand pastoral as a developmental genre within a Christian universe. His most notable contribution to the form was to yoke the progressive Virgilian career pattern to the circular life pattern of the Christian calendar.

Events and Personages

Edmund Spenser lived at a time when the charged relation between the two 'contexts' of this chapter, Britain and Europe, was changing drastically, and, as we will see, his own relation to these shifting contexts was often equivocal. Inserting Spenser into historical contexts can be problematic, and, certainly, no amount of 'context' can finally decide the meaning of Spenser's life or work. In the several books of The Faerie Queene and elsewhere, we find an ongoing mediation on historical contexts that is an index both of Spenser's own uncertain placement within them and his indeterminate effect on them. Sometimes this dialectic can be traced quite clearly: not only can Spenser's work be set 'within' these historical contexts, but these contexts themselves are, to an extent, being defined by him as he writes. In the later years of the sixteenth century, for instance, one of our contexts, that of 'Britain', was not yet assembled as an effective political union. Strictly speaking, 'Great Britain' would not come into existence until 1801. But Spenser invested in the imagining of such a polity throughout his career, and some of our conception of 'Britain' as a splendid fusion of disparate nations we owe to him. 'How brutish is it not to vnderstand', cries Arthur in the second book of The Faerie Queene, looking up from a chronicle titled Briton moniments, 'How much to [Britain] we owe, that all vs gaue, / That gaue vnto vs all, what euer good we haue' (II, x, 69). In other places, however, the dialectic between Spenser and his contexts is less easy to discern.

Dickens and language: one of the great love-matches of literary history, with a bottomless dowry to boot. It often seems as if the untapped reserves of the English vernacular were simply lying waiting for Dickens to inherit them - by marrying their riches to his story-teller’s instinct. No one ever wrote prose that way before. And at the same time few writers have ever sprung their manner from such outright imitation. The style of Dickens’s novelistic career begins in pure derivation, a sustained send-up not only of the Johnsonian high style of journalistic and parliamentary claptrap in the eighteenth-century Age of Rhetoric but of Sir Walter Scott’s editorial aliases and their prefatory paraphernalia - and then finds its true quasi-oratorical tone amid the cleared debris of tradition. Here is the launching sentence of his debut novel:

Realism in Dickens’s time was magical, for the city was a fairy-tale come to life, grim, exhilarating, and transformative. To describe this urban world was to create a new Bible, encompassing heaven and earth, and all that lies between, the keynote struck at the beginning of Bleak House:

Personal experience fed the literary work: when Dickens was born on 7 February 1812, London was a city of horse-drawn carts and carriages, entered through city gates like Charing Gate, Newgate, with its formidable prison, and Kennington Toll Gate. When Dickens died fifty-eight years later in 1870, the gates and city wall had been pulled down and built on, and London turned into a sprawling monumental city, transformed by the industrial revolution, especially the railroad and entrepreneurial capitalism as well as the British imperial venture, into the first world-city.

Two early examples suggest the importance of visual art in Dickens’s conception of his own role. One is the title of his first book, Sketches by Boz and Cuts by Cruikshank, which doubly insists (the parallel of the two artists, the author as sketcher) upon the similarities of writing and drawing. The other is the first image in the last number of Nicholas Nickleby, Daniel Maclise’s portrait of Dickens, subsequently incorporated as the frontispiece to the first edition (figure 1), a formal representation of the writer and the fact of his literary success. Replacing the fourth illustration of the final number, in some sense this image also illustrates; but rather than picturing some portion of the text, the portrait refers beyond it and beyond the writer’s mere textual presence to his life as a public figure. We see Charles Dickens supplanting Boz, a personage emerging from a pseudonym, his face rather than his prose the guarantor of identity, as if visuality has replaced the uncertainty of a mere name, mere words, with a self both recognizable and authentic (“Faithfully yours,” as the valediction over his signature declares). With this new public image attached to his writing, Dickens complicates the very conception of his “identity” (a term that can refer to the singular essence of some thing or person as well as to its equivalence to something or someone else): to know the writer we must see his face – see it, that is, formally rendered by a major contemporary painter. Presenting the “real” Dickens with a picture, illustrating the author, the portrait locates both the writer and his fiction within Victorian visual culture.

To open Book I of The Faerie Queene is to encounter immediately the question of what kind of poem one is reading. A nationalistic panegyric that eulogises Queen Elizabeth I, whom Spenser calls 'O Goddesse heauenly bright, / Mirrour of grace and Maiestie diuine, / Great lady of the greatest Isle' and, perhaps more honestly, 'O dearest dred' (I, proem, 4), The Faerie Queene has been described as well-written Elizabethan propaganda or at least as a celebration and extension of the queen's political mythology; as political poetry that is complexly engaged, critical of the queen and her politics; as a Protestant poem more shaped by its Reformation context than by fiction or secular literary ideals; as an inspired Humanist summation of mythology that brings into English a wealth of plot material (mythoi) from Irish, Welsh, Scottish, French, Italian, Latin and Greek sources; and as an anatomy of the imagination, a poetic place in which the literary imagination expatiates and dilates to demonstrate how poetry, moral and political value, and literary form intersect. Spenser's great epic-romance is, at some point or another, all of these things. The great challenge for any reader of Spenser, then, is to understand how these different faces of the poem can be brought into one focus.

Dickens is conventionally credited with having imported into a central role in the novel the figure of the innocent child - often suffering and orphaned, abandoned, or simply neglected - from Romantic poetry, where it (and its healthier and happier siblings) had been celebrated, notably if esoterically, by William Blake and, far more popularly, by William Wordsworth. Since a growing concern with children was itself a central feature of the evolving ethos of the middle class throughout the nineteenth century, especially in Britain and the United States, it is an interesting albeit impossible speculation to imagine what might have happened to our ideas of the family had Dickens opted for a career as an actor, say, instead of that as a novelist - much less what the fictions of Emily and Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, Mark Twain, Lewis Carroll, Rudyard Kipling, James Joyce, among many others, would have been like without the example of Dickens before them. Impossible though the speculation may be to complete, it seems clear that Dickens has, via such characters as Oliver Twist, Little Nell, Tiny Tim, Paul Dombey, and a host of others, made an enormous difference in the way our culture thinks about children.

An oversimplified account of Dickens’s role in this story1 would run thus: in the early modern period and undoubtedly associated with the emergence of “individualism” and the rise of the middle class and the “domestic,” there emerged an idea of the child quite unlike earlier conceptions, which had assumed children to be essentially animalistic and uninteresting, or merely deficient, undeveloped, and incomplete adults.

Dickens’s last two completed novels are “dark” with a sense of social estrangement. Their keynote is the orphaned Pip’s intuition of life as a “universal struggle” (GE 1), their arena increasingly London, the site of modernity. By the 1860s Dickens’s domestic life was in tatters, with his wife discarded, his home sold, his family a disappointment (even Kate, his favorite daughter, having married precipitately to get away from it all), the letters enshrining the past put to the bonfire, and his relationship with Ellen Ternan illicit. He had long despaired of the institutions of social power. Increasingly, and despite his reactionary tendencies as he grew older, a profound questioning of such basic conditions of Victorian life as class privilege and the effects of capital became the ground bass of his work.

Near the end of the first movement of Great Expectations, Pip watches in the gloom as the recaptured Magwitch is rowed out to the black Hulk moored off the marshes. As the convict disappears over the side of the ship, “the ends of the torches were flung hissing into the water, and went out, as if it were all over with him” (5). This evocation of the archetypal ferrying-off of the damned by torchlight to the underworld, coming as it does after the whole community has enjoyed the ritual of a hunting down, has something of the purgative force with which, at the climax of melodrama, the villain is hissed and flung out in a circle of dying stage fire.

There is a conspicuous restlessness about the novels which Charles Dickens conceived in the 1840s: Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-44), Dombey and Son (1846-48), and David Copperfield (1849-50). In part, their mobility is geographical: travelers voyage and return from England to the Continent, the United States, Australia, and India. England is a commercial hub: at the center of trading networks and a growing colonial power. Internally, conceptions of spatiality shift as a result of new modes of travel. The coaches of Martin Chuzzlewit are replaced by the railways which slice through urban and rural environments in Dombey and Son, effecting shifting points of view. And travel, these novels make clear, has everything to do with offering different perspectives. The shifts of location are one of the means by which the reader’s attention is continually redirected, especially in the first two novels. In these, different groupings of characters are interwoven, juxtaposed, brought into implicit conversation with one another in a way which amplifies the novels' central conceptual concerns with selfishness, with forms of value, with families, with desire, and with self-realization. If the third of the novels, David Copperfield, differs from the other two in being unified by one central narrative voice, its own sense of motion is given not just by the successive stages through which David passes on “the road of life” (64), but by the continual oscillation of time between the present of the narration, and the recollections – sometimes sharp, sometimes dream-like and hazy – which haunt the writer, causing him to lose “the clear arrangement of time and distance” (57).

This essay discusses the shorter poems that Spenser published in the 1590s with the exceptions of 'Mother Hubberds Tale' and Colin Clouts Come Home Againe. Do they have anything in common aside from authorship and relative brevity? Perhaps so. All concern love or sorrow, and some explore the often tense relation of those two energies that Spenser variously locates in the psyche, the state and the cosmos. True, much human life can be read as a dialectic of desire and melancholy (in Elizabethan terms, 'forward' and 'froward' passions), but Spenser's focus on the dialectic is particularly sharp. These poems are by definition non-epic ventures. Yet awareness of The Faerie Queene is never far away, sometimes detectable in verse on the collapse of greatness, sometimes, more obliquely, in echoes of Virgil or Ovidian subversions of the Aeneid, and sometimes audible as references to the national epic on which Spenser the lover knows, or says he knows, he should be working.

Complaints (1591) was published by William Ponsonby, publisher of the 1590 Faerie Queene. Much remains mysterious about this venture. Did Spenser oversee its printing? In a preface Ponsonby reports that he has collected the contents, extracting poems from those owning copies, retrieving others 'purloined' from Spenser, and failing to obtain some others. Spenser had been in England, so it is possible that he oversaw the printing or at least authorised the volume's arrangement.

Dickens is unusual if not unique among canonical English-language authors in remaining at once a vital focus of academic research and a major figure in popular culture. Only Shakespeare, Mark Twain, and perhaps Jane Austen can compare with him in terms of their ability to hold the attention of both a scholarly and a general audience. The range of Dickens’s appeal throughout the English-speaking world can be measured not only by his regular presence on school reading lists and in university courses, but by the frequency with which his novels continue to be adapted for the stage, for television, and for feature-length films. In Britain, where his image has appeared on postage stamps and on the ten-pound note, Dickens has become a staple of the national culture, a commodity available for export as well as for internal circulation. In North America, where hardly a day goes by without some Dickens reference appearing in the local or national press, A Christmas Carol has attained virtually the status of myth and elicits parodies, piracies, and annual theatrical performances with increasing frequency. Extending Paul Davis’s apt phrase about the Carol, one might say that Dickens has become a “culture-text” for the world at large.

In 1847 Dickens was a world-famous author raking in profits from serial novels and Christmas books. At that time he wrote several versions of his earlier life, attempting to explain to himself and his vast public how he had transformed himself from an ill-educated boy sent to work at the age of twelve in a shoe-blacking factory into the toast of European letters. The inauguration of a cheap edition of his novels provided an opportunity to write new prefaces accounting for each work’s origin. For Pickwick Papers, his second title (1836-37) and first novel, he disclosed the beginning of his vocation as writer. William Hall, formerly a bookseller and in 1836 the partner of Edward Chapman in a modest publishing firm, arrived at Dickens’s rooms in Furnival’s Inn on 10 February 1836 with a proposal for the young author, known for his street sketches and tales published under the pseudonym “Boz.” It was to supply letterpress accompanying etched illustrations by the comic artist Robert Seymour, some of which had already been prepared to illustrate the story Seymour had in mind.

In Hall, Dickens reported, he recognized