Challenging residual doubts about Vaughan Williams's role and significance within twentieth-century music and culture, this book places and explores his life and music in their broad musical, cultural, social, and political contexts. Chapters by scholars from a range of disciplines re-evaluate the composer's life and career within a world marked by both rapid change and refigured traditions – a world in which cultural and political nationalism was a fact of everyday life. Building on scholarship that has established Vaughan Williams as aesthetically and politically progressive, the book advances a revisionist perspective by broadening understandings of the nature of his responses to modernity. This portrait of a modern composer emerges not merely by focussing on underrepresented interests and pursuits, but also by contextualizing activities that have been misrepresented as merely 'conservative' and 'backward-looking'.