Anna Akhmatova is a prominent presence in international canons of war poetry, yet her range and significance as a war poet remains underappreciated. Akhmatova is unique among Russian poets, given the Soviet emphasis on 1917 as historical watershed, in identifying 1914 in hindsight as the start of the ‘real’ twentieth century. This chapter situates Akhmatova’s tragic, patriotic view of war in its contemporary intellectual context, and in that of scholarship on gender and war poetry.It examines key lyrics, focusing on religious and pastoral motifs, and highlights Akhmatova’s distinctive approach through comparison with the poetry of her soldier husband, Nikolai Gumilev.Overall, it argues that the war marked an important transition in Akhmatova’s writing, allowing her to develop the characteristic blending of individual with collective voice – and ethical emphasis on memory and bearing of historical witness – that are commonly associated with her later work and which continue to resonate now.

This chapter investigates how Faulkner uses the figure of eyes as inkwells in his depiction of Temple Drake in his sensationalist 1931 novel Sanctuary where she is raped with a corncob by an impotent gangster. The ink represents the various narratives men imagine themselves drawing from her – she is either too sexual or not sexual enough, the victim of a crime or its instigator. Faulkner wrote Requiem for a Nun (1951) as a sequel to Sanctuary that in many ways recapitulates this sadism, but he suggests the possibility that Temple herself could achieve a new kind of agency as a paperback writer in the manner of Faulkner penning these salacious novels and eventually profiting from them. The topic of masculinity in Faulkner’s work is also fraught terrain. In Soldiers’ Pay (1926), Margaret Powers surprises the young Robert Saunders swimming naked; his body, the narrator says, looked like the color of old paper. This marks on Robert’s body a female gaze. Throughout his career, Faulkner wrestled with the idea that writing connotes effeminacy over and against masculine action, but spiritually and physically strong women become connected with writing in ways that defy a strict gender binary.

Chapter 1 begins by considering three instances of Faulkner’s writing reused in new contexts: Malcolm Cowley’s 1946 Portable Faulkner; a commonplace book of Faulkner quotations published in 2000; and the current use of the line from his 1951 book Requiem for a Nun, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” as a widely circulated shorthand for persistent racial inequities that makes him, for many readers, more relevant today than at the height of his post-Nobel fame in the 1950s. While Faulkner seems to have meant this line as a critique of one character’s view, he likely would not object to the current use of the phrase due to his particular view of history whereby old artistic works take on new life by their use in the present. The chapter examines how Faulkner’s 1936 novel Absalom, Absalom! stages the issue of using documents, here in the form of letters, to construct an historical narrative. While Faulkner is widely understood today as a kind of historian, this chapter shows how he is more concerned with the ways in which historical texts, along with works of the imagination, create a sense of the past as an inherently multimedia endeavor.

Upon learning of Gabriel Fauré’s death, his patron Leo Frank Schuster (1852–1927) raced across the Channel to attend the grandiose state funeral in Paris. The reason for this hectic journey was twofold: Schuster sought to mourn a departed friend, but he also hoped to hear Fauré’s Messe de Requiem, Op. 48, which was being sung for the occasion. As the Requiem had not yet been performed in Great Britain – it would not be heard there until 1936 – Schuster did not want to miss this opportunity.

This chapter introduces the first of the fifteenth-century teacher Johannes Tinctoris’ three ‘registers’ of polyphony: the music for the Mass, beginning with the Mass cycle (setting the Ordinary of the Mass, in liturgical terms) and its development during the Renaissance, then the Propers of the Mass, then finally the Requiem. Whereas the setting of Propers and their chants is a practice as old as polyphony itself, the Mass cycle and the Requiem were more recent phenomena. Guillaume Du Fay’s ‘Missa L’Homme armé’ appears as a case-study, showing how the Mass cycle builds on the work of previous composers of Mass-music in England and aspects of the isorhythmic tradition (which in a sense it supersedes), whilst introducing new elements that condition the form’s later history through to the end of the Renaissance. The end of the chapter highlights the porousness of practice sketched earlier with regard to the boundary between mass-music and motets, discussed in the following chapter.

We begin our consideration of Brahms’s politics and religion with the great historical turn that occurred in the centre of Europe in the year 1870. With the decisive German military defeat of France and proclamation of King Wilhelm I of Prussia as German Emperor, the German Question was at last given its definitive Prussian-dominated Smaller German solution. Brahms probably would have preferred a Larger German solution that included Austria, Prussia’s traditional rival for leadership in the loosely bound German Confederation that was established by the Congress of Vienna following Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815. But what mattered most was that Germany had at last emerged from its political impotence to become a nation-state possessed of power and influence in the world commensurate with its long-recognised achievements in the cultural sphere.

We begin our consideration of Brahms’s politics and religion with the great historical turn that occurred in the centre of Europe in the year 1870. With the decisive German military defeat of France and proclamation of King Wilhelm I of Prussia as German Emperor, the German Question was at last given its definitive Prussian-dominated Smaller German solution. Brahms probably would have preferred a Larger German solution that included Austria, Prussia’s traditional rival for leadership in the loosely bound German Confederation that was established by the Congress of Vienna following Napoleon’s final defeat in 1815. But what mattered most was that Germany had at last emerged from its political impotence to become a nation-state possessed of power and influence in the world commensurate with its long-recognised achievements in the cultural sphere.