Haitian poetry experienced a shift, beginning as early as the 1870s, away from nationally inspired themes toward a greater insistence on poetic form and a penchant for contemplative verse. Poets often pondered abstract notions like the passage of time or the mysteries of nature. Other times they chose to write from the anguish of personal experience, mourning the loss of love to death or betrayal. Their melancholic reflections were not necessarily devoid of politics. Poets Virginie Sampeur, Massillon Coicou, and Etzer Vilaire composed their own eclectic poetry years before contributing to the famous journal La Ronde. Theirs is a poetics of ‘disenchantment’, a term that permeates the pages of the journal and characterizes their reactions to Haiti’s distressing domestic and international political situation. I offer an assessment of these three key poets and of the journal, affirming and going beyond the idea of the ‘understated political aspect’ of the movement. I demonstrate that the politics occasioning and emanating from this poetry embody distinctly Haitian calls for literary perseverance, a prescient battle for national preservation to which La Ronde is dedicated.

This chapter traces the history of essay writing about art in Britain from the early nineteenth century to the present day. Developing out of eighteenth-century periodical essays, a more individualistic approach to art writing begins with Romantic essayists like William Hazlitt. For John Ruskin, the essay offered a means to connect his personal responses to the visual arts with a larger project of social and moral reform, while for his aestheticist successors, it enabled an exploration of the affective dimensions of those responses. For modernist writers like Virginia Woolf, Samuel Beckett, Wyndham Lewis, or D.H. Lawrence, faced with the institutionalisation of art history, the art essay offered a testing ground for questioning assumptions about medium specificity or experimentation that animated their fiction. For contemporary writers from John Berger to W.G. Sebald, the proximity of the art essay to life writing has enabled the blurring of boundaries between essay, fiction, and autobiography.

From Francis Bacon to Zadie Smith, British essayists have played a crucial role in defining and interrogating the idea of transatlantic essayism. Not to be confused with its American form, which has been central to the promotion of exceptionalist cultural ideology in the United States from the Puritans to the present, British transatlantic essayism came into its own in the early twentieth century. Beginning with an account of D.H. Lawrence’s essays and their critical engagement with Americanness, this chapter explores the development of transatlantic essayism in the work of key essayists for whom the Anglo-American context has been of central importance, including W.H. Auden, Christopher Hitchens, Pico Iyer, Martin Amis, and Zadie Smith. What emerges is both a history of British transatlantic essayism and an account of the ways in which it continues to complicate our sense of the modern essay’s development on both sides of the Atlantic and beyond.

Between the 1870s and the 1930s in England an unprecedented number of women writers entered the public sphere as essayists. Whereas George Eliot established the Victorian ‘woman of letters’ as a commanding presence, a generation later the New Woman arose as a complex figure shaping ‘The Woman Question’ for twentieth-century writers like Virginia Woolf. This period between the Victorian and modernist eras saw an increase in women’s political writing on suffrage and the anti-war movement. Yet, the literary place of women’s protest writing in this period remains opaque. Focusing on Woolf’s experiments with a hybrid ‘novel-essay’ in The Years and Three Guineas alongside Vernon Lee’s political essays as precursors, this chapter argues that the modern literary essay developed in tandem with the protest essay. This approach allows for a consideration of the political stakes and achievements of hybrid experiments with the essay that revealed the inseparability of politics and aesthetics.

Why would a literary scholar say that he would ‘take it as a reproach’ if his work was called essayism? There is a good chance that we may understand this comment too easily, or not at all. The polemical postures of modernism (and the critical fashions of the academy) often seem remote from, or even opposed to, the essay in its casual, elegant, personal, speculative modes. This chapter traces not a reconciliation between the two stances but various forms of entanglement. Looking at work by Virginia Woolf, Marianne Moore, T.S. Eliot, H.D., and Ezra Pound, this chapter asks what happens when modernist rigour needs the conceptual flexibility of the essay; when poetry cannot do without prose; when the imaginary is seen as the fiercest form of the real; when the objective correlative, without becoming subjective, encounters more shades of meaning than anyone thought it could manage.

The chapter attends to Les Murray’s fusion of ancient and modern frameworks, forms and, subject matter. It provides an analysis of “The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Cycle” in light of his desire to draw together the three strands he viewed as shaping Australian culture: Aboriginal, rural, and urban. The chapter also discusses Murray’s formal inventiveness and comic playfulness with language, and his interest in the relationship between poetry and the divine. The chapter reads Murray’s self-definition as an outsider in light of his valuing of a pastoral-georgic tradition and a focus on subjects and settings beyond the metropolitan. The chapter argues that while Murray engaged with the vernacular and was anti-modernist in outlook, his style is, nevertheless, sophisticated and neo-modernist in its technical innovation.

This chapter outlines how Christopher Brennan ushered in an experimental strand of Australian poetry through his engagement with French Symbolism, which was followed by John Shaw Nielson’s celebration of intuition and the more-than-human. It considers Nietzschean vitalism in Kenneth Slessor’s representation of urban Sydney and analyses the beauty and nihilism of his “Five Bells.” The chapter also argues that Lesbia Harford’s poetry was modernist in its radical openness about female sexuality and the female body, its minimalist representation of the working life of modern women, and lack of Romantic assumptions in her treatment of the natural world. It further considers the rhetorical force and frankness of queer desire in the work of Anna Wickham, before addressing the hoax poet Ern Malley.

Paul Dukas believed that the strongest influence that Debussy came under was that of writers, not composers. Writers were also prominent in his friendship circles, and this chapter outlines the importance of these circles to Debussy’s musical development. So many French composers have been influenced by artists of all types at least as much as by their musical peers, and Debussy was no exception to this. Perhaps surprisingly for someone so personally reserved, his face-to-face encounters with writers were at least as important to him as the time he spent reading their books. But as a collaborator, he was far better at discussing projects than actually completing them: Debussy’s list of projected theatrical works is considerably longer than his list of achievements in this sphere. His personal connections with writers started with the odd coincidence that Debussy’s first piano teacher was Paul Verlaine’s mother-in-law, Antoinette Mauté de Fleurville; her daughter, Mathilde, and the poet lived under her roof when the nine-year-old Debussy studied with her.

In the decades since his death, Debussy has become a cultural icon – a symbol of music’s modernity. He has been immortalised by a monument in the Bois de Boulogne in Paris, a museum in his hometown of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, and a bust in the Théâtre national de l’Opéra-Comique. His portrait even appeared on a twenty-franc banknote. Over the past few years, Debussy’s stock has only risen. In 2011, New York Times critic Anthony Tommasini ranked him the fifth greatest composer of all time, behind Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, and Schubert. This chapter ranges widely over many aspects of Debussy’s reputation and legacy.

Since the early 1880s, Paris had become a place where it was possible to be ‘modern’. In the arts, by Modernism we mean a vast movement based on the concept of modernity appealing to the notions of evolution, progress, independence, freedom, and also resistance to certain social and economic change. Modernism in art in the broadest sense will constantly evolve and take many forms. Thus, if Symbolism and Impressionism dominated the Debussyan sphere, many other movements marked the period (1880–1914) and they aroused varied reactions on the composer’s part, ranging from the sincerest interest to the most pronounced rejection. To be interested in Modernism in the world of Debussy is therefore to be as interested in Neo-Impressionism, Fauvism, Orphism, Cubism, Naturalism, and even in Futurism. Art Nouveau (Modern Style) is given its due in this broad context. Debussy was particularly sensitive to the style and possessed a magnificent Art Nouveau lamp by the English firm Benson & Co., which he probably bought at the Siegfried Bing gallery Maison de l’Art Nouveau (Bing was a great proponent of Art Nouveau).

Chapter 3, on Yeats’s middle period, begins with some reflections on his prose works that help explain his evolving ideas about art and personality, ideas that he formed in large part as the result of his friendship with John Synge. The logic of misrecognition, which in the early works animated his creation of both possible and impossible worlds, in mid-career works from Responsibilities (1914) to Michael Robartes and the “Dancer” (1921) tends to emphasize the the artist’s responsibility to the actual world from which he borrows to furnish his creations. The represented world of his work thus tends to dominate over the expressed world, but this does not prevent the latter from structuring reflections on history in a way that stresses the creative agency of the poet, driven by personality, the “shaping joy” of the artist. Personality enables a form of expressiveness in which the world of the work models new relations to (and alongside) historical time. It is central to Yeats’s worldmaking project and his relation to the actual world around him.

150 words: The books of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah contain oracles that address problems in and around ancient Judah in ways that are as incisive and critical as they are optimistic and constructive. Daniel C. Timmer’s The Theology of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah situates these books in their social and political contexts and examines the unique theology of each as it engages with imposing problems in Judah and beyond. In dialogue with recent scholarship, this study focuses on these books’ analysis and evaluation of the world as it is, focusing on both human beings and their actions and God’s commitment to purify, restore, and perfect the world. Timmer also surveys these books’ later theological use and cultural reception. Timmer also brings their theology into dialogue with concerns as varied as ecology, nationalism, and widespread injustice, highlighting the enduring significance of divine justice and grace for solid hope and effective service in our world.

50 words: This volume examines the powerful and poignant theology of the books of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah. Daniel C. Timmer situates these books’ theology in their ancient Near Eastern contexts and traces its multifaceted contribution to Jewish and Christian theology and to broader cultural spheres, without neglecting its contemporary significance.

20 words: This volume draws out the theology of Nahum, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah, attending to their ancient contexts, past use and reception, and contemporary significance.

Drawing upon their respective expertise in early twentieth-century literature and music, Matthew Ingleby and Ceri Owen explore the centrality of literature within Vaughan Williams’s work and career, demonstrating that his literariness was not simply an outgrowth of his personal artistic proclivities, but rather was mediated by several institutions that were key to the production of a new sense of English national identity during the first half of the twentieth century. By contextualizing Vaughan Williams’s literary tastes and choices for musical settings – including his interest in historically remote, non-contemporary, and Anglophone writers and texts – it is argued that such choices should be read less as evidence of the reactionary, conservative nationalism with which he has often been associated, and more as an indication of his participation in forward-looking currents within twentieth-century literary culture. Ingleby and Owen conclude by proposing that, while the nation may have been the frame through which Vaughan Williams often articulated a complex relation to modernity, his powerful interest in internationalist figures such as Walt Whitman and William Blake suggest that his cultural nationalism formed part of a broader humanitarian aspiration, one that was implicitly indebted to his literary imagination.

This chapter provides an introduction to how Vaughan Williams’s music was received in interwar continental Europe, particularly within music magazines and scholarly periodicals. It is in two sections. The first considers the different contexts in which it was heard: choral performances of the Mass and folk-song arrangements, pieces played at International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) festivals, and performances of large-scale works in ‘seasonal’ orchestral concerts and recitals. For the most part, Vaughan Williams’s music was well received, even at ISCM festivals, where he might have been overshadowed by more radical figures; and the increased number of European performances that he received during the period reflected a growing interest among leading continental performers. The chapter then examines some of the writing on Vaughan Williams by continental critics, primarily those from France and Germany. These reveal two contrasting but not necessarily mutually exclusive narratives: one in which Vaughan Williams is presented as the leader of a new English school of composition that is underpinned by the language of English folk song, and another in which Vaughan Williams is considered in a pan-European context, where the influence of French impressionism is more keenly felt. A table of selected performances is also included.

Many thousands of historical pageants were held in twentieth-century Britain. These musical-dramatic re-enactments of history were especially popular in the interwar period, and in the 1930s Ralph Vaughan Williams collaborated with the novelist E. M. Forster to create two such pageants: The Abinger Pageant (1934) and England’s Pleasant Land (1938). Drawing on a range of published and archival sources, this chapter challenges readings of these and other pageants as expressions of a reactionary and conservative artistic (anti-) modernism. It sets them in the context of Vaughan Williams’s involvement with the Folk Revival, and his conception of folk culture as of vital relevance to contemporary society and its problems. It argues that these amateur performances of local history should be seen as realizations of Vaughan Williams’s ideals for a national culture which rested on the revival of local communities through art that was made by those selfsame communities. Vaughan Williams’s historical pageants were consistent with his left-leaning reading of English history, and with his belief in the radical potential of art – and specifically art that drew on an autochthonous vernacular musical tradition – to enrich human experience in the here and now, and on into the future.

The chapter locates Pirandello’s characters against the backdrop of modernist culture. Beginning with Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Nietzsche’s reflections on the multiple nature of the “I,” Pirandello’s construction of his characters proves fully in tune with contemporary developments in European thinking. When dealing with such fictional characters as Mattia Pascal and Vitangelo Moscarda, Pirandello goes for an anti-heroic approach to their relationship with history as opposed to nineteenth-century Romantic heroism. Theatre characters, on the other hand, escape definitions and roles to the extent that they become Nobody, following in the footsteps of Dostoevsky, Binet, and Blondel’s reflections on psychology and freedom.

In his essay On Humor, Pirandello effectively places himself in the tradition of Cervantes, who engaged modern problematic subjectivity, not with the tragic relativism of his contemporary Hamlet but with a nimble comic irony that learns to live within the condition. Some three centuries later, growing dissatisfied with the realist tradition Cervantes had helped to found, a number of early twentieth-century European writers, largely influenced by Nietzsche, including James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence, and Thomas Mann, turned to myth not only as a literary form but also as a form of life. In their work, the poetic imagination seeks to become mythopoeic and thereby affirm the mythic basis of human culture. In three late plays – Lazarus, The New Colony, and the unfinished The Mountain Giants – Pirandello also turned to mythic motifs, but these works are not attempts at mythopoeic creation so much as they are political and moral allegories using mythic themes.