Not long ago, modern poetry - Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Stevens - seemed to occupy an enormous territory on the literary-historical map. But as the twentieth century comes to an end, the Modernism that once loomed so large now seems startlingly diminished. Beginning in the late 1950s, critics began to see through the smoke screen of New Critical antiromanticism, uncovering the important affiliations between romantic, Victorian, and modern poetics. Today, in the wake of pioneering work by Frank Kermode, Robert Langbaum, and especially Harold Bloom, Eliot not only seems indebted to Tennyson; his Modernism makes most sense when we understand it as part of a continuum beginning with the publication of the Lyrical Ballads.

And if the historical integrity of Modernism has been encroached on by romanticism, an increasingly powerful postmodernism has exerted equal pressure from the opposite side. Certain modern poets - for Marjorie Perloff, Pound but not Stevens - are claimed as proto-postmodernists, leaving the impression that the remaining Modernists are a hapless, ineffectual lot.

The ancient parallel between literature and the visual arts - i.e. painting, sculpture, and architecture - becomes newly relevant in the twentieth century. Painters were the first to explore the revolutionary possibilities of Modernism, so that painting became the leading art form. Modernist writers often patterned their literary experiments on parallels drawn from the visual arts. It is impossible to understand fully the development of literary Modernism, therefore, without at least a rudimentary knowledge of modern art. This chapter is intended to provide a brief history of modern art for those whose primary interest is modern British and American literature. It follows the version of Modernism that was endorsed by the Museum of Modern Art in the 1930s and that has served as the standard for most of this century. Literary parallels will be drawn primarily from poetry, since there the influence of the visual arts is deepest and most direct.

When people speak of Pound's antisemitism, they are thinking primarily of the antisemitic tirades included in the speeches that he broadcast over Rome Radio between 1941 and 1943. Although, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and America's entry into World War II, Pound stopped his broadcasts for two months, he resumed them on January 29, 1942. Since the United States was now at war with Italy, Pound's radio attacks on Franklin Delano Roosevelt and praise of Benito Mussolini seemed, to the United States government, to be the acts of a traitor and, on July 26, 1943, Pound was indicted for treason in Washington. On May 3, 1945, he was taken into custody by the American forces in Rapallo and was interned, from May 24 to November 16, at the US Army “Disciplinary Training Center ” north of Pisa, a prison and rehabilitation camp for US military offenders. From there he was flown to Washington where the court found him “of unsound mind” and so unable to stand trial for treason. On December 21 he was incarcerated in St. Elizabeths Hospital, a federal psychiatric institution, where he would remain for twelve and a half years until, on April 18, 1958, the indictment against him was dismissed. Although the legal issue raised by the Rome Radio broadcasts was the charge of treason, in the over fifty years since Pound's indictment the antisemitism of the broadcasts has been the primary focus of the widespread outrage and outcry against him.

In Germany, the emergence of both civil society and political democracy followed the same trajectory of modernisation. Like democracy, civil society had a troubled start in a country where state policies continued to emulate authoritarian traditions and restrict rights of social participation. Democracy and civil society took a firmer shape after 1945 when anti-democratic forces had lost their commanding influence while unprecedented economic growth reduced inequalities.

This chapter traces the emergence of civil society with reference to non-German labour migrants and to women. Both groups were largely excluded from rights of social participation at the beginning of the twentieth century and constituted a focal point of the National Socialist agenda. In the post-war era, the East German model decreed women's equality through employment and excluded non-Germans from civil society. The West German model extended social citizenship to non-German minorities and women without overcoming all legacies of exclusion that had gone before.

Labour migration and non-German minorities in German civil society

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries when German rulers tried to develop the economy of their region and boost tax yield, foreigners played a key role as financiers, engineers or specially hired technicians. Non-German minorities who sought refuge from religious persecution - the Huguenots or Jews for instance - also benefited from the interest in importing modern business practices. Including such minorities into German society invariably took the form of special privileges. Although permitted to pursue their trades, these minorities remained excluded from civil society and their special status could be withdrawn at will by the ruler.

Introduction

The codification of English usage, not by an official academy but by a disparate band of independent entrepreneurs, constitutes the story of this chapter. It is a story of increasing knowledge about language in general and English in particular, of competition between prescriptive and descriptive ideals of grammar and lexicography in the market-place and of a shifting role for the place of speech and writing in codifying the language. It is also a story of the influence of piety, morality, discipline and social politics on the evaluation of English usage as the language was codified and the codifications disseminated over the last two centuries. The focus throughout is on Britain, but the interactions between Britons and Americans and the intertwined scholarship and international markets for English-language grammars and dictionaries make a tidy separation of the British and American stories impracticable. Following section 6.1, the discussion is divided into three periods. Section 6.2 concentrates on the years roughly from the mid-eighteenth century to the introduction of comparative historical linguistics into Britain around 1830, section 6.3 the period from 1830 to 1930 so as to encompass the entire scope of planning and producing the Oxford English Dictionary, and section 6.4 the span from the completion of the OED to the close of the millennium. The chronological subdivisions are somewhat arbitrary in that the patterns examined do not start or end on particular dates, but the periods serve as convenient frames for focusing on notable trends. Section 6.5 offers some conclusions and prospects. (American views of grammar and usage are reported in volume VI.)

In a modern-day society, the means by which its members communicate with each other are a constitutive element of its make-up. The central place of communication and mass communication applies to the world of work but has also become an integral part of leisure activities. In contemporary Germany, leisure and the media of mass communication have become inseparable facets of everyday culture: 'according to recent leisure research... reading books... occupies only the tenth place of the most frequent leisure activities, after watching television (80 per cent), reading newspapers or magazines (62 per cent), listening to the radio (59 per cent), talking on the telephone (44 per cent), having a cup of coffee or a glass of beer (42 per cent), socialising with friends (37 per cent), gardening (36 per cent), sleeping late (36 per cent) and listening to records or audio cassettes (33 per cent)' Thus, much of the leisure time of Germans is taken up by interacting with and through media. Media of mass communication such as newspapers, the telephone, television and radio rank highly in contemporary society and culture.

The stylistic debate, 1830-1900

In the first half of the nineteenth century German architects and theorists were engaged in a vigorous debate over which architectural style was most appropriate to the age and the location. Initially only two models were admitted, the Classical style of Greece and the Gothic style of Northern Europe. While the structural premises of these two styles - based, respectively, on the beam and the vault - were quite different, there was a strong belief in the possibility of fusing them in a new style that would combine the best attributes of both. Karl Friedrich Schinkel succeeded in doing exactly this in his design for the Bauakademie in Berlin (1831-6) in which the structural principles of the Gothic vault were combined with the formal and decorative elements of Neo-Classicism. An alternative to Schinkel's brilliant reconciliation of the Greek and the Gothic was the invention of a third, alternative style, and this was achieved with Friedrich von Gärtner's Staatsbibliothek in Munich (1831-42), in the Neo-Romanesque 'Rundbogenstil'. Between 1830 and 1840 the respective virtues of the three styles now on offer were the subject of lively discussion, as was the most likely means of resolving the conflict. The most promising development came from the realm of materials, with the emergence of iron as a building material.

The soundscapes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

Superficially, the period under consideration might appear to contain little of phonetic and phonological interest, compared with, for example, earlier changes such as the transition from Old to Middle English, and the Great Vowel Shift (see CHEL III, forthcoming). Thus, Millward claims that ‘by 1800, the [consonant] system was identical to that of today’ (Millward 1989: 215), and that ‘the PDE vowel inventory was achieved by the end of the EMnE period, although there have been some allophonic and distributional changes since 1800’ (Millward 1989: 219). Jespersen draws attention to a limited number of changes: for example, /n/ being used sometimes for /ŋ/ in unstressed position (singin’, bringin’, etc.), the use of intrusive /r/ from the end of the eighteenth century, the growing instability of the phonemic contrast between /ʍ/ and /w/ (e.g. where and wear), variability in the use of word-initial /h/ (e.g. in humour, hospital, humble), the loss of /j/ (e.g. in tune), and,for some speakers, the substitution of /w/ for /v/ in words like very and sorry (Jespersen 1909: 355 et seq). Similarly, Wyld notes comparable examples which show that a number of relatively small changes (systemic, structural, lexical-incidental, and realisational) had been in progress between about the middle of the eighteenth century and the First World War (Wyld 1914: 133–60. See also Horn & Lehnert 1954: passim).

The novel in the belated nation

There is a widespread view of German culture generally which says that it is, in all kinds of ways, thoughtful, sophisticated and profound; but that it is curiously bereft of any sustained relationship to the familiar, empirically knowable facts of daily living. Instead of concerning themselves at all vigorously with outward things, the Germans, so the argument runs, attend to such pursuits as music (that supremely nonreferential art), speculative philosophy, and theology (particularly when it assumes the guise of radical inwardness). This problematic condition of inwardness reveals its shortcomings nowhere more clearly than in the bulk of narrative prose works that issued from the German-speaking lands in the great age of European realism (that is, from the mid-eighteenth century onwards): whatever distinction may inhere in that body of prose writing, it cannot be claimed to be the distinction of common-orgarden realism.

However overstated such a view of German culture may be, there are elements of truth to it. Certainly its prose literature from Goethe on does pose an acute evaluative problem. The dilemma is felt by both non-German and German critics alike. Wolfgang Preisendanz speaks for many commentators when he writes:

Introduction

Syntactic change

The topic of syntactic change in late Modern English is only just beginning to get its share of serious scholarly attention, and compared with the towers of published syntactic research which the Syntax chapters of volumes I–III in this series have been launched from, this chapter has had to rely rather more on its own bootstraps. All research surveys are by definition provisional, this one especially so.

By 1776 the English language had already undergone most of the syntactic changes which differentiate Present-Day English (henceforth PDE) from Old English (henceforth OE) (see CHEL I: 170–1). Older patterns of word order with the verb at the clause end or in second constituent position had long been replaced by an unmarked order framed by the sequence subject–verb–object or subject–verb–complement. A subject noun phrase (NP) was virtually obligatory in simple clauses other than imperatives. Great simplifications had taken place in morphology, so that the noun and adjective had already reached their present, vestigial inflectional systems, and the verb nearly so. The number and frequency of prepositions had expanded greatly, and prepositions now served to mark a variety of nominal functions. Prepositions, particles and other words frequently joined simple lexical verbs to form group-verbs like speakto, makeup, takenotice of. Such formations as the prepositional and indirect passives had become commonplace.The complexity of the English auxiliary system had grown to encompass a wide range of mood and aspect marking, and much of its present systematic structure was already in place, including the dummy auxiliary do. Some patterns involving finite and nonfinite subordinate clauses had been rare or impossible in OE; by 1776 most of the present repertoire was available.

The 'German Question', however one phrases it, always involves, at least by implication, German Jewry. In its classical formulation - on national development and territorial unity - the query raises issues of citizenship, political participation and social change with immediate bearing on the Jewish communities in Germany. More recently, the German Question asks how the country could have embarked on the terrible course that led to the Third Reich, the Second World War and the Holocaust, which very nearly realised its goal of eliminating the Jewish presence in German society. In short, the story of German-Jewish relations reflects at once the hope and the horror of German history.

Jews and Germans have lived together for nearly 2000 years, and different but related tensions characterise this association - variously described as a symbiosis, a dialogue, a long quarrel and an alliance based on deception - before and after Auschwitz. The Holocaust marks a singular historical moment that has everything to do with German-Jewish relations today. But one damages the past by conflating all of German-Jewish experience with the Holocaust, or by reading events of the last centuries as simply a prelude to National Socialist atrocities. For an adequate understanding of the meaning and direction of the German-Jewish history, one must consider the longer record of Jews in Germany.

Arguably one of the most conspicuous leitmotifs running through German cultural history is the degree to which music has assumed a role of national significance far exceeding that in any other European country. An obvious starting-point for explaining such a phenomenon would be the almost unbroken legacy of major German-speaking composers who have exercised a lasting international influence over musical developments over the past 200 years. But other factors have proved equally vital to the all-pervasive influence of music. Consider, for example, the multiplicity of opera houses and orchestras (something in the region of 150 at the present time) that have existed in each major provincial and metropolitan centre since the nineteenth century, or the unparalleled opportunities that Germany has offered for music education, drawing students from all over the world. Then one must take into account the strong musicological traditions in German-speaking countries which have provided the fundamental principles for almost all musical scholarship of recent years. In statistical terms, this preoccupation with musical analysis, research and theory has been exemplified by a much greater number of specialised periodicals devoted to music than in any other country.

In the roughly 150 years between the middle of the eighteenth century and re-unification, German society faced two major economic and socio-structural revolutions. The industrial revolution, which lasted from the early 1840s to the eve of the First World War, turned a still predominantly feudal society into a largely industrial society. The second revolution, which one might call a material revolution, transformed post-war German society between 1950 and 1970 from a society deeply scarred by dictatorship, defeat, and destruction into one of the most affluent societies in Western Europe. Despite the structural similarities of the two revolutions, their outcomes were radically different. The industrial revolution ended in totalitarian dictatorship and the most destructive war in European history; from the second revolution, the vast majority of the divided nation emerged as a stable and increasingly pluralist democracy.

Historians and social scientists have proposed a number of interpretations to explain how a combination of various 'peculiarities of German history' in the nineteenth century led to the catastrophes of the first half of the twentieth century. Although the notion of a German Sonderweg (idiosyncratic development) has been significantly modified and to some extent discredited, it still retains some validity with respect to at least one problem: namely, that in Germany in the nineteenth century, the transformation of the social and political structure failed to keep pace with the progress of industrialisation. In Germany, unlike other industrialised countries, pre-industrial elites retained their predominant social and political position against the newly emerging industrial classes, stifling societal modernisation and inhibiting the evolution of a democratic political culture.

The birth of film in Germany

On 1 November 1895, nearly two months before the famous Lumière screening in Paris, the brothers Max and Emil Skladanowsky showed a fifteen-minute film programme at the Berlin Wintergarten using their Bioscop, and by June of the following year the inventor and entrepreneur Oskar Messter had sold his first flicker-free projector incorporating the Maltese cross mechanism. Soon after the turn of the century Messter was experimenting with the synchronisation of film footage and gramophone records and establishing his reputation as Germany's first major film producer. Germany thus had its share of pioneers at the start of film history. However, large-scale production of narrative film was slow to develop, allowing French, Danish, Italian and American films to dominate until the First World War.

In the wake of increasingly vociferous attacks on cinema for its low moral standards and corrupting influence the term Autorenfilm (writer's film) was coined in 1913. This tag was intended to enhance the reputation of the medium through the script of a recognised author, as exemplified by Max Mack's Der Andere (The Other, 1913), a variation on the Jekyll-and-Hyde motif, written by the playwright Paul Lindau. It was during this period that leading theatre directors, including Max Reinhardt, began to work in cinema, and filmmakers, drawing creatively on the German Romantic tradition, devised special effects to stage fantastic narratives: Stellan Rye's Der Student von Prag (The Student of Prague, 1913) introduced the motif of the Doppelgänger, and Paul Wegener and Henrik Galeen's Der Golem (The Golem, 1914) drew on the cabbalistic legend of the clay man.

Vocabulary is central to both the system and the use of language. Words are what are pronounced and written and organised into sentences and other grammatical combinations, being the fundamental units of meaning. Words are also what ordinary users think of as language, for they are accessible and reflect more fully the whole culture and respond more quickly to changes in society than do other aspects of language.

The study of the English vocabulary

Vocabulary study has a long history, going back in the Western world to Plato's Cratylus. The study of English vocabulary, however, received a sharp boost with the interest of members of the Philological Society in making a New English Dictionary, eventually renamed The Oxford English Dictionary (Murray, Bradley, Craigie & Onions 1884–1933). In the middle of the nineteenth century, Dean Trench (1851, 1855), who had been instrumental in beginning the OED, was a significant contributor to the field. Caught in the Web of Words (Murray 1977) traces the history of this major dictionary, and Empire of Words (Willinsky 1994) critically analyses its strengths and weaknesses.

The most important general English dictionary of the twentieth century is Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, edited by Philip Babcock Gove (1961). Its history has been traced by Herbert C. Morton (1994). The most important new specialised dictionary of the century is the Dictionary of American English (Cassidy and Hall 1985–).The history of English language lexicography before the period covered by this volume has been treated by Starnes and Noyes (1946), and that of American lexicography during the post-1775 period by Algeo (1990).