Part I, which begins with this chapter, examines the significance of 1910 and the context of cultural change in the wider period. 1910 is not merely another date on the calendar, an arbitrary historical marker, it is a site of potent cultural myth, the myth of sudden historical and cultural change itself. It also marks the birth of formalist theory for the modern era. Part I goes on, in later chapters, to examine the definitive orders of literary criticism and theory, stemming from the foundational critical work of Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot, that emerge in the 1910s and 1920s from this first moment of impact for the aesthetics of modernity in the context of cultural and political upheaval. Part I, indeed, begins and ends with Woolf's famous declaration on 1910: "On or about December 1910, human character changed." It begins with this chapter's considerations of 1910, and closes with considerations, in Chapter 5, of the later context (of the mid-1920s) in which Woolf made the statement.