Caroline de la Motte Fouqué's Gothic short story “Der Abtrünnige” (The Turn Coat, 1816) opens on the evening of August 7th 1814, moments before King Friedrich Wilhelm III's regiment returns from the battlefield to Berlin, heralded with a burst of patriotic imagery and pomp. The Prussian eagle on the flag seems to circle above the newly liberated capital city; braziers illuminate the Opernplatz; and the streets of Berlin fill with a sea of lights shining amid laurels and flowers. A crowd waits in tense, silent anticipation until the king appears, in all of his regal glory; “Er wird die Sonne der Nacht” (112; he becomes the sun of the night). Transformed into the very source of light, the king embodies Prussian patriotism in this scene. The crowd erupts into a loud “Hurra!” (112) and follows the king, cheering through the streets to greet the regiment at the Brandenburger Tor.

Such patriotic scenes were common during the summer of 1814 as victorious soldiers returned from the Befreiungskriege to Prussia. For example, Fouqué's description of the events of August 7th bears striking similarities to the historical account of the homecoming celebration published in Königlich privilegirte Berlinische Zeitung. Prussia's role in the Befreiungskriege (1813–14) was in part the result of large-scale social and military reforms enacted after Prussia's defeat by the French in 1806. Following the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire and the French occupation, Prussia began a series of reforms aimed at strengthening its military and uniting its citizenry against the French, with the goal of one day reclaiming its sovereignty. This provoked a rise in nationalism and anti- French sentiment among the educated middle and upper classes throughout German-speaking Europe in general and Prussia in particular. Although the fragmented state of German-speaking Europe prevented the articulation of a unified German identity, Germany existed as a Kulturnation, bound by a shared culture, language and literature. This understanding of Germany was key to promoting the war effort that would eventually defeat Napoleon. Military homecoming ceremonies, such as the one depicted in “Der Abtrünnige,” referenced this shared Germanness and therefore played an important role in constructing national identity before Germany became an actual nation.

As early as 1896, Delius had promised himself that he would never again ‘go kicking around the ante chambers of well known Conductors’ in the hope of igniting some interest in his work. In the ensuing years he was left with no option but to swallow his pride; without unlimited resources there was really no alternative. He continued, therefore, to send his scores and to make personal visits to music's power brokers, especially those in Germany; but felt that ‘only a miracle can push me thro’’. To call the breakthrough that he finally enjoyed in Germany between 1903 and 1906 a miraculous act would be to rob the composer of the credit he deserved. Delius and his closest supporters, in particular Ida Gerhardi, never stopped promoting his music. It is, however, clear that the decisive factor was the extraordinary maturing, around the turn of the century, of his creative identity and technical processes. When, at last, the dam was breached, it was because the sheer weight of artistic mastery in his music had become irresistible. Leading conductors such as Hans Haym in Elberfeld, Julius Buths in Düsseldorf, Fritz Cassirer in Berlin and Hermann Suter in Basel, as well as Max Schillings and Carl Schuricht, all experienced the same intoxicating feeling that they were discovering a hidden treasure, a unique musical genius who with every new score broke more new ground. German festivals began to compete for the prestige of giving Delius works.

Having acquainted himself with the scores of Paris, Lebenstanz and Appalachia, Julius Buths, musical director at Düsseldorf, wrote to the composer that his compositions demonstrated

One of Delius's finest scores, Sea Drift, was composed in 1903 to words by Walt Whitman. After conducting the work in Dortmund, Carl Schuricht assured Delius that he found in his music ‘a new flowering of the purest, most spiritual and most perfect art’.

List of visits to Norway

With principal places visited

1881 Commercial journey to Sweden and Norway

1882 Commercial journey to Norway; Hardangervidda (?)

1887 Western fjords; Hardangervidda; Malmøya

1889 Hamar; Fredriksværn; Bergen; Jotunheimen

1891 Aulestad; Bergen; Lofthus; Haukeli; Fredriksvarn; Kristiania

1893 Drøbak; Kongsvinger; Åsgårdstrand; also short visit to Sweden

1896 Bagn; Røros; Valdres; Jotunheimen; Rondane

1897 Kristiania

1898 Åsgårdstrand (?); Kristiania;

1899 Åsgårdstrand; Jotunheimen

1902 Nevlunghavn; Åsgårdstrand; Dovre; Jotunheimen

1906 Fredriksvarn; Åsgårdstrand; Østerdalen

1908 Vaga; Geiranger; Sunnmøre; Jostedal Glacier; Jotunheimen; Fredriksværn; south coast villages

1911 Lauvasen; Gålå; Jotunheimen

1913 Geilo; Gol Plateau; Tyin; Hardangervidda; Bergen; Lofoten (?)

1915 Nordfjord; Hjerkinn; Geilo; Kristiania

1919 Valdres; Kristiania

1921 Lesjaskog; Kristiania

1922 Lesjaskog; Kristiania

1923 Lesjaskog; Kristiania

COLNE Priory in north Essex was excavated by the Channel 4 TV's Time Team, broadcast in March 2012; in the programme, it was suggested that the cell of an anchoress may have been attached to the priory church. A paper I subsequently wrote for the Essex Society for Archaeology and History examined the evidence – slim as it was – for the existence of a female anchorite at Colne Priory; while there was evidence for the existence of an anchoress in the area, it was not possible to prove conclusively that she had been enclosed at the male Benedictine priory. However, the trace of a room that may have been an anchorite's cell was found; the possibility that an anchoress lived there raises interesting questions about the spirituality of solitary enclosure and its relationship with the community, religious or parochial.

The argument for the presence of an anchoress at Colne Priory is worth briefly revisiting. During the excavations featured on Time Team, a ‘mysterious room’ on the north side of the nave of Colne priory church, just to the west of the crossing, was seen in the geophysical survey; a trench was dug, but although the outer wall of the church to which the room was attached was found, there was no evidence of the walls of the room itself. It may have been a wooden structure intended to last only the lifetime of one occupant: there is no mention of another anchorite occupying a cell at the priory at a later date. The evidence of the geophysical survey suggested that the cell measured just four metres by one-and-a-half; at first it was thought that this might be a private burial chapel. If it were an anchorhold, it was a small space in which to spend years enclosed, though not without precedent. The cell in which the early twelfth-century anchoress, Christina of Markyate, spent more than four years was even smaller, a room tucked in the corner between two walls: ‘amplitudo plus palmo semis inesset’ [‘the space was not bigger than a span and a half’], and Anne Warren gives two examples of very small, ‘restricted’ cells.

Goethe's influence on music

Anyone who ventures into the vast regions of the nineteenth-century Lied meets a powerful presence almost immediately. Time and again the text is by Goethe, whose lyric imagination left an indomitable imprint on European music history. Even a cursory glance at Friedlaender's Das deutsche Lied bears testimony to multiple settings of Goethe's poems: there are, for example, 132 settings of ‘Erlkönig’, and the range and variety of this abundant repertoire is immediately striking. Ernst Challier's Großer Lieder-Katalog and Willi Schuh's ‘Goethe Vertonungen’ give further evidence of the musicality of Goethe's language and its location of meaning at the cradle of the Lied. Schubert's first masterpiece, Gretchen am Spinnrade, was a setting of a dramatic scene from Goethe's Faust. The earliest songs of Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Louis Spohr, Carl Loewe, Johannes Brahms, Richard Wagner and Hugo Wolf were to texts by Goethe, which raises the question as to the reasons for the poet's influence. Yes, Goethe was a supreme lyric poet. The binding force of form and meaning, or rhythm and sense, that characterizes Goethe's lyric poetry – so evident in ‘Auf dem See’, in the ‘galloping’ iambic rhythms of ‘Willkommen und Abschied’, the rhythmic virtuosity of ‘Erlkönig’, the restless dactyls of ‘Rastlose Liebe’, the rocking dactylic rhythms of ‘Über allen Gipfeln’ – offered composers a wealth of material with which to cut their compositional cloth. Goethe was an object of admiration, even veneration, throughout the nineteenth century, and the sheer quantity and variety of music his poetry has inspired bespeaks the huge fascination exerted by his writing and his personality. Yet the steadfastness of his occupancy of the Lied goes beyond these explanations. Deeper currents must explain why Goethe's poetry goes hand in glove in our musical heritage.

From the time he burst onto the literary scene with the publication of Werther in 1774 until long after his death in 1832, Goethe was a catalyst for many composers, who wanted to challenge what song could be.

The Unconscious in Faust

Just before his final monologue in Part II, Act V of Goethe's drama, the now blind Faust hears what he imagines to be the sounds of the construction of his urban utopia. Of course what he is actually hearing are the Lemures of Mephistopheles busily digging his grave. To add irony to the scene, Goethe turned (characteristically, for Faust) to a song form. While they work, the Lemures sing a paraphrase of the gravedigger's ditty from Hamlet. The song serves to mock Faust's life and predicament, but their words are seemingly inaudible to Faust beneath the din of their spades. Drawn to the musical implications of the scene (and to Faust's deafness toward it), Robert Schumann chose to set this grotesque and foreboding moment to music in Part II of his oratorio Szenen aus Goethes Faust. Its significance to the composer can be affirmed by the important motivic reference in the Lemures’ chorus that deliberately connects the passage to other key moments in the oratorio both before and after this scene (Example 8.1).

This very motif – a sequence of descending thirds or fourths – can be seen as embodying a problem that persists in the scholarly reception of Schumann's Szenen aus Goethes Faust. Nearly every investigation of the work mentions the motif – for it figures prominently in the overture and in many of the scenes, a few of which are shown in Example 8.2.

Furthermore, some commentators also point out the fact that the same thematic material is heard in Schumann's only opera, Genoveva. Yet precisely what the motif represents is a point on which there is little agreement. Anfried Edler associates the motif with fear, while Stephen Billington names it the ‘devotion’ motif. Eric Sams has suggested that the theme represents love, both happy and hopeless – except for the places where it represents Gretchen, and remorse, and Mephistopheles. The only unifying factor among these views is that the theme must represent or symbolize something. In this, the influence of Wagner and his concept of Leitmotif – a musical gesture with a deliberate and concrete association – can clearly be seen.

In the early afternoon of 28 July 1889, three tired hikers arrived at the mountain cabin at Eidsbugarden. They had been travelling inland from the west coast for several days, but it was here at the portal to the Jotunheim mountains they felt that their summer tour would really begin. The eldest of the three was Edvard Grieg (forty-six), the youngest was Fritz Delius (twenty-seven), and for both this journey was the fulfilment of a long-held desire. Since getting to know Delius two years earlier, Grieg had been seeking an opportunity to introduce him to Jotunheimen. Delius had been under the influence of Grieg's music since his boyhood, and now the Norwegian was to be his personal guide to Norway's most magnificent nature. The third member of the trio was Christian Sinding (thirty-three). Emerging from an obsessive and secret love affair, he was looking forward to this journey as a key to regaining his equanimity.

Around the dinner table that evening a dozen travellers gathered. Among them was a Norwegian with a huge beard, a historian who, in the coming battle for Norwegian independence and national realisation, would have an even greater role to play than Grieg. For three hundred years the country had been governed from Denmark. In the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars, Norway entered into a union with Sweden in which there was virtual political equality. As the tide of Romantic nationalism swept Europe in the nineteenth century, Norwegian nationalists demanded full sovereignty for their nation. Once independence was achieved in 1905, Norwegian commentators would regard Professor Ernst Sars as the spiritual father of the victory.

Grieg and Sars. At this first, impromptu meeting between two giants of Norwegian cultural life, Delius was a witness. It was a remarkable moment and can serve as a fitting point of departure for this chapter about the Norway that Delius would have experienced at the close of the nineteenth century. For here, seated at the table at Eidsbugarden, were representatives of the dualism that came to typify Norway's political and cultural awakening. Everyone in the cabin, Sars and Grieg included, would have been attracted there by Old Norway: the Norway of the free-minded peasant, the mountain shepherd, the summer farm hanging from a seemingly inaccessible hillside.

‘DANGER’, real and imagined, has been an undercurrent in Australian life and culture since settlement. In 1788 convicts arrived in a strange and unfamiliar land. Life-threatening creatures – snakes, spiders and crocodiles – abound, and children wandering off were ‘lost in the bush’. Indigenous peoples were removed from the land, ‘dispersed’, murdered and starved, and forced onto missions and government reserves. The descendants of the ‘first fleet’ and consequent arrivals in boats developed a special anxiety about Australia's coastlines. In one of the volumes of the official history of the First World War, the chapter on Australia's tropical forces visualizes this danger with a map on ‘possible disease invasion’: thick arrows from the North and North-East target neighbouring Pacific islands – Dutch New Guinea, ex-German New Guinea and Papua, the British Solomon Island Protectorate and the Condominium of the New Hebrides – that form an arc behind which Australia shelters. If this barrier fell, the map seems to say, Australia would be defenceless. This ‘oriental’, at times Russian, at times Chinese, Indo-Chinese and Japanese threat was countered in Australia with diverse measures of securing the nation: coastal forts and quarantine stations were built and policies on migration legislated, forming the so-called ‘White Australia policy’ that restricted migration on racial terms. In this chapter I examine how themes of danger from outside and from within were an influence on the home front during the Second World War, and what was done through policies and government actions to remove danger by internment. The chapter examines the changing needs of the home front, the internal debate about service to the Empire and, finally, the reasons why internal danger ceased.

War

On 3 September, at 9.15 p.m. Australian time, Robert Menzies, prime minister of Australia, announced to the British subjects of Australia his ‘melancholy duty to inform you officially that … Great Britain has declared war upon her [Germany] and that, as a result, Australia is also at war’.

WHILE GROWING UP IN PARIS in the 1870s and early 1880s, the young Marcel Proust spent much of his time reading a variety of fictional and nonfictional texts, many by midcentury authors influenced by the French Romantic period, which was at its height from roughly 1820 to 1840. Stories such as the cloak-and-dagger escapades of Capitaine Fracasse by Théophile Gautier, the comic missteps of Tartarin de Tarascon in Alphonse Daudet's eponymous novel, and the harrowing tales of medieval France in Récits des temps mérovingiens by the Romantic historian Augustin Thierry imbued the future novelist from an early age with a Romantic sensitivity. Proust's Romanticism, which is perhaps most evident in the tumultuous affair between Swann and Odette in “Swann in Love,”1 was not limited, however, to the intensely emotional accounts of love and loss that are frequently associated with this literary movement. His readings as a youth exposed him to a wide range of motifs, including the allure of foreign settings, the search for the absolute, the mystique of the artist, a certain disdain for the mediocre and an appreciation for what might initially appear ordinary, dissatisfaction with the present, a taste for dramatic embellishment, connections between nature and the spiritual world, the appeal of history and local color, and the charm of the creative spirit of the people.

Given the makeup of Proust's library in his youth, it is not surprising that an array of Romantic principles underpin his monumental novel, In Search of Lost Time. Near the beginning of the novel, which retraces the evolution of a young boy into a mature writer, the protagonist encounters two individuals, representing divergent currents that spring from French Romanticism, who will play a fundamental role in his artistic evolution. The first of these is Françoise, the cook and housekeeper, initially for Aunt Léonie in Combray and then for the protagonist's family in Paris.

WITH JUST THE TITLE OF HIS NOVEL, Ali and Nino, Kurban Said constructs the first of several binary oppositions that structure the themes and plot of the story. Upon the characters of Ali and Nino, Said stages other cultural dichotomies that characterize turn-of-the-century Baku, including Orient/Occident, Islam/Christianity, tradition/progress, ancient/modern, and male/female. It is this final dichotomy, the gender binary, that Said returns to time and time again in the novel to personify aspects of these other oppositions that are not as readily comprehended on their own. He infuses these binaries with gendered affects, emotions, and desires so that the readers can understand their magnitude. In the tradition of other narratives like Aeneas and Queen Dido of Carthage in Virgil's Aeneid or Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra that tell the history of the clash of two nations through the conventions of a love story, Said characterizes the themes of cultural ideology, religion, and nationalism in gendered terms. Yet, with the relatively cosmopolitan setting of Baku, Azerbaijan, where Occident and Orient meet and supposedly opposite cultures live in some degree of harmony, Said adjusts the features of this narrative convention. His story is not about the inevitable tragedy of two individuals from two irreconcilable cultures, but it is instead about the ambiguity of maintaining identity when those individuals fall in love and share spaces and traditions.

By placing the narrative perspective with Ali, Said's novel inverts the power and gender dynamics commonly associated with European novels about East/West conflicts by granting the Oriental subject interiority and control over the narrative. The Orient is given the male perspective, complete with the gendered expectations of a budding patriarch whose identity as man, Muslim, and Easterner comes into question as he is seduced by the charms and graces of the exotic, “modern” West personified by the alluring and intelligent Nino. It is my aim in this essay to explore how Kurban Said continually infuses modernity and Western ideology and culture with the seductive language of femininity. I argue that the female body becomes both the symbol of and the space upon which the question of modernization in the Orient is debated.

WHEN Barbe-Nicole Clicquot, née Ponsardin, lost her husband in 1805, she was 27 years old and found herself in control of a company involved in banking, the wool trade and champagne production. In her hands, and through economic collaboration with family members, the company concentrated on winemaking, introducing innovations (some inventions her own) and improvements to the product. She also extended the market share of the company through exports, for example to Russia, while the Napoleonic Wars were raging. At the time of her death in 1866 the company was producing 750,000 bottles per year instead of the 100,000 annually when she took over. The brand Veuve Clicquot (the widow Clicquot) still exists today and is one of the most famous champagnes in the world.

Women like Barbe-Nicole Clicquot can be found throughout history, widows who were not shrinking violets, huddled in corners tearfully peeping out from under the widows’ veil, but mothers, grandmothers and businesswomen who took on the world dominated by men. One of the aims of this book is to remind readers of their existence.

Women, Families and Individuals

In present-day western society the nuclear family has become both an ideal and a myth, particularly favoured by the advertisement industry. Smiling families enjoying a family day out, a family night in, a family meal, the new car, etc, populate our television screens every night. Despite statistics about family break-up, ageing, etc, we are continuously told that this is what we should aspire to, that this is what is ‘normal’.

The normalisation of the nuclear family as a domestic haven was generated in the nineteenth century, as was the restructuring of the roles of the participants: the father, active in the world; the mother, isolated in the home; the child, passive, quiet and decorative, no longer a working participant in the family; the home, purged of outsiders like apprentices and ‘outside’ kin. Servants were allowed, but no longer sharing sleeping quarters or the family table, instead relegated to cellars and attics. It would seem that this ideal did not always fit the reality, but the image was triumphant and lives with us still today.