This chapter explores the tensions produced by Vaughan Williams’s desire to make a significant contribution to English cultural life as a leading composer while also not discussing his compositions in any detail in a public forum. Vaughan Williams conceived a path for himself as a musical activist, leading practical amateur music-making, while creating new works that reflected his community. Yet the experience of his first large-scale premiere, A Sea Symphony, at the Leeds Musical Festival in 1910, revealed that public attention, while necessary, could also be discomforting.

In private, Vaughan Williams was more relaxed: he was the centre of attention at parties and enjoyed the company of younger women, with whom he sometimes flirted under the nickname of ‘Uncle Ralph’. He was also deeply committed to his composition pupils, supporting them in ways that went far beyond any contractual responsibility, and often enjoyed working with conductors preparing his new works. Yet public scrutiny was always a source of anxiety, even in his final years. Coping strategies, including avoidance and deflection, enabled Vaughan Williams to navigate the public demands of his role while focusing on the process of composition.

The international outlook of any community, at any stage in its development, is likely to be determined very largely by the interaction of four overlapping factors: geographic position with its strategic requirements; racial composition and resulting prejudices; economic interests, actual and potential, and, by no means least in importance, traditional policies and ideological trends. The relative strength of these several influences varies from period to period. Their individual content may change considerably under pressure of events either inside or outside the community, including the impact of party politics and of powerful personalities. They nevertheless have much to contribute to an understanding of the involved and complicated behaviour patterns of democratic societies in their relations with foreign states and peoples.

Chapter 2 explores the Ecuadorean rainforest landscape, its inhabitants, and their first interactions with the oil industry before large-scale oil extraction started in the late 1960s. It starts by looking back at the millennia of gradual changes when the history of crude oil and the tropical rainforest environment started to intersect. An exploration of the geographical properties of the Amazon landscapes, as well as their flora and fauna including human inhabitants, visualizes the lively environment encountered by the first oilmen visiting the area in the period between the 1920s and the 1960s. Two multinational oil companies, the Leonard Exploration Company and Shell, undertook major efforts to discover petroleum reserves in the Ecuadorean Amazon. Even though their exploration programs failed in the end, their pioneering work of mapping and surveying the rainforest and its subsoil laid the foundation for large-scale petroleum extraction decades later.

This chapter highlights the importance of newspapers as essential publishing venues for American essayists during the 1880–1920 period. During this time, newspaper columns or editorials were some of the most powerful manifestations of the American essay. A new kind of personal essay emerged, revealing tensions between various categories: the genteel and the modern, progressivism and prejudice, subjectivity and objectivity. While essayistic objectivity aspired to provide verifiable evidence and to be “truthful” in its interpretations of the world, essayistic subjectivity attempted to engage the reader by means of the essayist’s own perceptions and experiences. Significantly, during this period, the essay sought new vessels for authorial subjectivity, be it in the form of fiction or nonfiction, expanding the possibilities of the personal essay. Important essayists, columnists, and editorialists of the period included H. L. Mencken, Anna Julia Cooper, Robert Benchley, Ida B. Wells, and Heywood Broun. For many of these writers, the political and personal are inseparable, and the essay often functions as a form of authorial mediation, of narrative outrage, and a call to social action.

This chapter begins with the little magazines of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and ends with contemporary online literary magazines, highlighting the radical changes that have taken place as print yielded to digital culture. Motivated by the contrarian personalities of their founding editors against commercial tastes, small-circulation periodicals prioritized aesthetic experimentation and established themselves as an avant-garde force in the arts. During the twentieth century, literary magazines would become institutionalized and relinquish their financial and intellectual independence. Their avant-garde status, once represented by a collectively upheld editorial persona, would become overshadowed by individual cults of personality around popular writers. Magazines’ social programs would become watered down, and instead writers would make themselves into social actors. The arrival of New Journalism in the 1960s and ’70s radically changed long-form journalism, rendering it more literary. The chapter ends with the contemporary literary magazine ecosystem, showing that what magazines have lost in materiality, they have gained in generic hybridity and global access.

This chapter examines the many roles played by signs in dissonant languages, that is languages no longer spoken on city streets, in the urban linguistic landscape. These ghost signs are examined in four cities designated by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) as World heritage sites: Toledo, St Petersburg, Palermo, and Lviv. Primary data comes from my fieldwork, which included site visits, participation in tours in relevant languages, interviews with tour guides and visitors, and analyses of UNESCO reports, tourist guides, media, and travelogues. A critical analysis of the data shows that multilingual ghost signs perform multifaceted urban identity work: promoting attractive narratives of harmonious past diversity, they recontextualize the cities as “welcoming” and “cosmopolitan” and deflect attention from present-day suppression of minority languages, be it Uzbek in St Petersburg or Russian in Lviv.

As C. H. Wang observed in 1975, early Chinese representations of war generally perform an “ellipsis of battle” – readily narrating the causes of a war and its ultimate results, but avoiding detailed accounts of the fighting. The reason for this omission lies in the Mencian doctrine that the true ruler of the world must be “one who does not love killing.” Whether or not actual rulers loved killing, they had to be represented as if they went to war only against their will. Twentieth-century conditions changed the meaning of war in China as elsewhere. Warfare was now done by armies massively mobilized among the population; noncombatants found themselves taking an active part or being massacred; phases of civil war pitted Chinese against Chinese. Poets faced a dilemma: to prioritize the obligations of Chinese citizens in a life-or-death struggle for the survival of the nation, or persist in an individualist stance that the struggle put at risk? Examples of modern poets’ thinking through real and imagined actions of warfare show how twentieth-century Chinese literature demolished longstanding taboos and claimed new thematic territories.

Here I examine in more detail my first case study, namely mid-twentieth-century Turkey. The presence of high-quality census data from Turkey between 1935 and 1965 allows me to replicate my statistical analysis from the previous chapter at the provincial level to show that urbanization is correlated with increasing levels of people identifying as Turkish; moreover, this relationship is robust to the inclusion of a number of different controls and the use of sub-samples. Qualitative examination of evidence from Turkey suggests that this process was a consequence of economic structural change and incentives provided by the state, such that incentivized assimilation took place in urban Turkey but not in the countryside. Indeed, I show that a lack of industrialization in Kurdistan was responsible for the lack of Turkish identification in the region, despite both violent and non-violent attempts by the Turkish state at assimilating its Kurdish population.

Wallace’s ambivalent engagement with high postmodernism is by now axiomatic in criticism, but his relationship to more immediate literary influences is less well understood. This chapter traces Wallace’s network of twentieth-century intertextuality beyond the familiar territory of his troublesome inheritances of Barth, Pynchon and Updike, focusing particularly on his entanglement in the written cultures of the 1980s. Much of the critical work that situates Wallace as a postmodernist heir focuses on the formal innovation and experimentation in his writing; this chapter broadens out to consider geography, motif and theme as well as form and idiom. More particularly, the chapter places Wallace in the context of the “Brat Pack,” arguing that his writing, animated by a spirit of what Jill Eisenstadt called “excess and defiance,” owes as much to the literary group that came of age during the 1980s as to the postmodernist patriarchs more commonly discussed. Taking as a point of departure the early writing, especially The Broom of the System and Girl with Curious Hair, in which many of these formative influences are more clearly visible than in the more mature work, this chapter considers the ways in which Wallace interacted with his own milieu and immediate forebears. Following the recent work of Thompson and Boswell in particular, the chapter also refers to Wallace’s own writing about his predecessors and peers, in which he often reflects, and indirectly reflects upon, the primary tendencies and themes of his own output; indeed, this chapter argues that the essays on other writers of the twentieth century are as revealing in respect of Wallace’s own writing as any of the overtly self-reflective/directive pieces. This chapter operates in conversation with the other chapters in this section, arguing that any attempt to interpret Wallace’s writing must be informed by an understanding of his complex critical, cultural and intertextual networks.