‘Modernity’ is a relatively new term in literary scholarship on the turn of the twentieth century. Sociologists organise their research around issues of ‘modernisation’ unique to this period: the Taylorisation of industrial production, the professionalisation of science and the organisation of the modern research university, the development of new mediums and media for both mass transportation and mass communication, and the impact on the conceptualisation of a public sphere of women’s and non-whites’ advocacy for an extension of the rights of citizenship to previously excluded populations. Sociologists focus as well on the ‘dramatic transformations of worldviews and philosophies’ encompassed by the still broader term ‘modernity’ (290). By contrast, literary scholars typically have mapped late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century history in terms of a neat, clean and emphatically teleological succession of literary movements, charting a ‘progress’ from realism to either naturalism or aestheticism and Decadence and then to Modernism. Rather than entertaining the possibility that these aesthetic modes can exist simultaneously in the same text, or that they were produced and marketed for different audiences throughout this period, the emphasis until quite recently has been placed on literary Modernism’s success in ‘extricat[ing] itself and our epoch from the fin de siecle ’. That is to say, artists and literary critics claiming Modernism to be the aesthetic of modernity first established its position front-and-centre in the cultural landscape by putting other aesthetic paradigms either ‘behind’ it or ‘below’ it (or both).

The gender of modernity

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The Cambridge history of twentieth-century English literature

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The Cambridge History of British Theatre

The impact of cinema on early twentieth-century literary and, more broadly, cultural consciousness has, until recently, been neglected Yet to look back at the period is to find that film consciousness was everywhere In 1928, Kenneth Macpherson, co-editor of the avant-garde film journal Close Up, wrote: ‘The cinema has become so much a habit of thought and word and deed as to make it impossible to visualize modern consciousness without it’ In the same year, the poet H D (Hilda Doolittle), a fellow contributor to Close Up, claimed that ‘the world of the film today […] is no longer the world of the film, it is the world […] There has never been, perhaps since the days of the Italian Renaissance, so great a “stirring” in the mind and soul of the world consciousness’ She was writing here about ‘Russian Films’, but the promise of cinema was its internationalism, its creation of a visual language that transcended cultural and linguistic differences, and that, for H D as for many other early film enthusiasts, did not survive the transition to sound in the late 19205 and early 30s George Bernard Shaw also saw the birth of film as a cultural revolution ‘The cinema’, he wrote in 1914, is a much more momentous invention than printing was… The cinema tells its story to the illiterate as well as to the literate; and it keeps its victim (if you like to call him so) not only awake but fascinated as if by a serpent’s eye And that is why the cinema is going to produce effects that all the cheap books in the world could never produce

Literature and cinema

‘It’s got here at last!’ So Cyril Connolly greeted the appearance in 1935 of David Gascoyne’s A Short Survey of Surrealism with a degree of surprise we may still share. Why had it taken so long for Surrealism to arrive in England? Andre Breton had, after all, presented the founding manifesto back in 1924 and the first experiment in automatic writing, The Magnetic Fields , which he co-produced with Philippe Soupault, had appeared four years before that. The war, of course, had closed borders, literally and metaphorically, and having survived the conflict without suffering invasion or revolution, England in the immediate wake of 1918 would be largely untroubled by the waves of crisis and nihilism which swept most European countries and which generated the newest avant-garde tendency, Dada. While Italian Futurism had launched itself on London in a spectacularly dramatic fashion, Dada would remain an obscurely ‘foreign’ phenomenon, receiving only patchy mention in literary magazines and never generating sufficient oppositional energy to initiate a parallel English movement in the way that Marinetti had lit the charge for Vorticism. What was known of the Dada group and the Surrealist tendency it had spawned by 1920 came mostly by way of little magazines rather than from direct personal contact, and the time-lag in picking up on the new movements also meant that it was difficult for most English readers to disentangle Dada, with its poetics of outrage and negation, from Surrealism, with its more affirmative and often prophetic stance.

Surrealism in England

‘Community’ has, suggests Graham Woodruff, a friendly ring: yet it is also a weasel word, lending a stamp of often spurious togetherness to bodies politic or theatric. Thus, the use of ‘community’ in the geographical sense is often drained of any true meaning, where it is not a cover for the avoidance of contentious political issues. ‘Communities of interest’ had some success in speaking theatrically in the 'seventies, but now, Woodruff claims, the political situation is such that ‘community theatre’ can and should seek to express the common interests of the increasingly beleaguered working class, offering a way of extending the dramatizations attempted outwards from parochial to wider political concerns. Graham Woodruff was Head of the Drama Department at the University of Birmingham before becoming director of Telford Community Arts, on whose work he draws for the following article.

Community, Class, and Control: a View of Community Plays

Since its opening in 1961, the Victoria Theatre in Stoke-on-Trent has arguably been England's most adventurous and inventive repertory theatre, distinguished by the number and range of new plays it has produced – and particularly by the series of local documentaries which has set out to explore and reflect the life of the local community. The first issue of Theatre Quarterly (1971) covered the early years of the old Victoria Theatre, and included an article by the director, Peter Cheeseman, on the company policy and production style of what was then Britain's only permanent theatre in the round. In addition, a ‘Production Casebook’ followed the creative processes and the techniques involved in rehearsals of one of the early Vic documentaries, The Staffordshire Rebels. Here, Graham Woodruff looks at developments in the later Vic documentaries and, in the light of current discourses on popular theatre, history, and class politics, examines the implications of a regional theatre giving voice to ‘women of the working class’ in the latest Vic documentary, Nice Girls. Graham Woodruff, who has been Head of Drama at the University of Birmingham and for sixteen years worked for Telford Community Arts, wrote in NTQ28 (1989) on the politics of community plays, and is currently undertaking research on the ways in which the contemporary theatre gives expression to workingclass voices and interests.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0266464X00001135

Graham Woodruff

Papers

Community, Class, and Control: a View of Community Plays

‘Nice Girls’: the Vic Gives a Voice to Women of the Working Class