Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- General Editor's Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Department of War and External Affairs: The Anglo-Boer War and Imperialism
- 2 Department of Administration: Office Clerks and Shop Assistants
- 3 Children's Department: Edwardian Children's Literature
- 4 Department of Decadence: Sex, Cars and Money
- 5 Department of Internal Affairs: England and the Countryside
- Afterword
- Works Cited
- Index
Afterword
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 April 2017
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Acknowledgements
- General Editor's Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Department of War and External Affairs: The Anglo-Boer War and Imperialism
- 2 Department of Administration: Office Clerks and Shop Assistants
- 3 Children's Department: Edwardian Children's Literature
- 4 Department of Decadence: Sex, Cars and Money
- 5 Department of Internal Affairs: England and the Countryside
- Afterword
- Works Cited
- Index
Summary
My aim throughout this book has been to try to interpret Edwardian literature on its own terms, seeking to recapture the original significance of the novels, poems and plays discussed here by contextualising their writing and reception. The organising concept of the ‘Emporium’ has offered an enabling framework for this project, allowing separate departments of literary culture to be viewed both individually and also as part of a larger and connected enterprise. What these ‘departments’ confirm discretely and collectively are the problems inherent in taking too seriously Virginia Woolf's tongue-in-cheek claim for December 1910 as a starting point for artistic development in Britain in the twentieth century. The lasting influence of these inflexible interpretations of Woolf's thesis has hampered our understanding of what lies on the other side of this putative watershed. Philipp Blom's study of European history, The Vertigo Years: Change and Culture in the West, 1900–1914 (2008), presents a compelling challenge to those who have interpreted Woolf's 1910 starting point in rigid ways. Blom's case for antedating the temporal centre of artistic gravity from 1910 to the beginning of the twentieth century is established in the following terms:
In a large part, the uncertain future facing us early in the twenty-first century arose from the inventions, thoughts and transformations of those unusually rich fifteen years between 1900 and 1914, a period of extraordinary creativity in arts and sciences, of enormous change in society and in the very image people had of themselves. Everything that was to become important during the twentieth century – from quantum physics to women's emancipation, from abstract art to space travel, from communism and fascism to the consumer society, from industrialised slaughter to the power of the media – had already made deep impressions in the years before 1914, so that the rest of the century was little more than an exercise, wonderful and hideous by turn, in living out and exploring these new possibilities. (Blom 2008: 3)
Although Blom's conceptualisation of the period after 1914 as a mere ‘exercise’ of the ‘new possibilities’ established in the pre-war period is somewhat hyperbolic, his general thesis is convincing.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Literature of the 1900sThe Great Edwardian Emporium, pp. 185 - 186Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2017