In this book, the author addresses the relationship between art and society, from the emergence of bourgeois culture in the eighteenth century to the decline of modernism in the twentieth century.

Why do we often teach English poetic meter by the Greek terms iamb and trochee? How is our understanding of English meter influenced by the history of England's sense of itself in the nineteenth century? Not an old-fashioned approach to poetry, but a dynamic, contested, and inherently nontraditional field, "English meter" concerned issues of personal and national identity, class, education, patriotism, militarism, and the development of English literature as a discipline. The Rise and Fall of Meter tells the unknown story of English meter from the late eighteenth century until just after World War I. Uncovering a vast and unexplored archive in the history of poetics, Meredith Martin shows that the history of prosody is tied to the ways Victorian England argued about its national identity. Gerard Manley Hopkins, Coventry Patmore, and Robert Bridges used meter to negotiate their relationship to England and the English language; George Saintsbury, Matthew Arnold, and Henry Newbolt worried about the rise of one metrical model among multiple competitors. The pressure to conform to a stable model, however, produced reactionary misunderstandings of English meter and the culture it stood for. This unstable relationship to poetic form influenced the prose and poems of Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Alice Meynell. A significant intervention in literary history, this book argues that our contemporary understanding of the rise of modernist poetic form was crucially bound to narratives of English national culture.

John Marx argues that the early twentieth century was a key moment in the emergence of modern globalization, rather than simply a period of British imperial decline. Modernist fiction was actively engaged in this transformation of society on an international scale. The very stylistic abstraction that seemed to remove modernism from social reality, in fact internationalized the English language. Rather than mapping the decline of Empire, modernists such as Conrad and Woolf celebrated the shared culture of the English language as more important than the waning imperial structures of Britain.

R.H. Charles: A Biography first situates Charles's work in the history of biblical scholarship. The remainder of the book is divided into three parts that draw on material stored in several archives and other sources. The first provides an account of his early life and education in Ireland. Part two is devoted to his Oxford years (1890-1913). Within a chronological framework, the chapters regarding the Oxford period focus on his pioneering work with Jewish apocalypses as evident in his many textual editions, translations, and commentaries. For all of his major publications an attempt is made to assess how his work was received at the time and how it continues to affect the field of early Judaism. The third part furnishes a biographical overview of his work as a canon of Westminster (1913-31). At the Abbey, he carried out pastoral duties but also published books that made contributions to publicly debated issues such as divorce, while at the same time continuing his scholarly endeavours. The volume includes bibliographies of Charles's many publications and of works cited.

This is a compelling case study of a distinctive theological theme - the eschatological interpetation of the historical Jesus in Edwardian England - as an attempt to add greater precision to the history of theology in a neglected period. Looking at the impact of Adolf Harnack, Alfred Loisy, Albert Schweitzer and Johannes Weiss on biblical studies and theology before the First World War, Chapman argues that the future course of theology, in which eschatology played such a crucial role, was already mapped at this time. Assessing the work of William Sanday F.C. Burkitt and George Tyrrell, Chapman looks at the theological diplomacy between Britain, France and Germany and uncovers a cultural crisis that made eschatology such an appealing idea.

Offers a bold new argument about how Irish, American and Caribbean modernisms helped remake the twentieth-century world literary system.