Englishness Revisited

What is Englishness? Is there such a thing as a national temperament, is there a character or an identity which can be claimed to be specifically English? This collection of articles seeks to answer these questions by offering a kaleidoscopic vision of Englishness since the eighteenth century, a vision that acknowledges stereotypes while at the same time challenging them. Englishness is defined in contrast to Britishness, the Celtic fringe—Scotland in particular—Europe and the Continent at large. The effects of the Empire and of its loss are examined together with other socio-economic factors such as the two World Wars, de-industrialization and the different waves of immigration. Through a careful analysis of the arts, literature, philosophy, historiography, cultural and political studies produced in England and on the Continent over the last three centuries, a composite image of Englishness emerges, somewhere between centre and periphery, tradition and innovation, transience and timelessness, rurality and urbanity, commitment and isolation. Englishness is thus revealed as a protean concept, one which, whether it is a historical or political construct, a genuine emanation of a national desire or a simulacrum, retains its fascination and this volume offers keys to understanding its diverse expressions.

This book discusses selected works of literature written in Great Britain in the final decades of the twentieth century in the context of contemporary debates on English national and cultural identity. It investigates how Peter Ackroyd, Julian Barnes, and Adam Thorpe address the issue of Englishness and how they revisit its traditional formulations

Mad Dogs and Englishness connects English popular music with questions about English national identities, featuring essays that range across Bowie and Burial, PJ Harvey, Bishi and Tricky. The later years of the 20th century saw a resurgence of interest in cultural and political meanings of Englishness in ways that continue to resonate now. Pop music is simultaneously on the outside and inside of the ensuing debates. It can be used as a mode of commentary about how meanings of Englishness circulate socially. But it also produces those meanings, often underwriting claims about English national cultural distinctiveness and superiority. This book's expert contributors use trans-national and trans-disciplinary perspectives to provide historical and contemporary commentaries about pop's complex relationships with Englishness. Each chapter is based on original research, and the essays comprise the best single volume available on pop and the English imaginary.

This collection of essays examines representations of the English countryside and its mutations, and what they reveal about a nation’s, communities’ or individuals’ search for identity – and fear of losing it. Based on a pluridisciplinary approach and a variety of media, this book challenges the view that the English countryside is an apolitical space characterised by permanence and lack of conflict. It analyses how the pastoral motif is actually subverted to explore liminal spaces and temporalities. The authors deconstruct the “rural idyll” myth to show how it plays a distinctive and yet ambiguous part in defining Englishness/Britishness. A must read for both scholars and students interested in British rural and cultural history, media and literature.

Winner of the Political Studies Association WJM MacKenzie Prize for best book of 2014 The Politics of English Nationhood supplies the first comprehensive overview of the evidence, research and major arguments relating to the revival of Englishness, exploring its varied, and often overlooked, political ramifications and dimensions. It examines the difficulties which the major political parties have encountered in dealing with 'the English question' against the backdrop of the diminishing hold of established ideas of British government and national identity in the final years of the last century. And it explores a range of factors—including insecurities generated by economic change, Euroscepticism, and a growing sense of cultural anxiety — which helped make the renewal of Englishness appealing and imperative, prior to the introduction of devolution by the first Blair government, a policy which also gave this process a further impetus. The book therefore provides a powerful challenge to the two established orthodoxies in this area. These either maintain that the English are dispositionally unable to assert their own nationhood outside the framework of the British state, or point to the supposed resurgence of a resentful and reactive sense of English nationalism. This volume instead demonstrates that a renewed, resonant and internally divided sense of English nationhood is apparent across the lines of class, geography, age, and ethnicity. And it identifies several distinct strands of national identity that have emerged in this period, contrasting the appearance of populist and resentful forms of English nationalism with an embedded and deeply rooted sense of conservative Englishness and attempts to reconstruct a more liberal and civic idea of a multicultural England. This volume also includes a wide-ranging analysis of the culturally rooted revival of Englishness, drawing out the political dimensions and implications of this re-emerging form of national consciousness.

Englishness and Post-imperial Space: The Poetry of Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes probes into the English mindset immediately after the British withdrawal from the colonies, and examines how the loss of power and global prestige affected contemporary poetry, particularly that of Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes. Frustration and disillusionment, even anger, characterised the era and many of the literary works the period produced. Most writers became insular and were obsessed with the ‘English’ elements in their writing. The great, international and cosmopolitan themes (of Eliot, for instance) were replaced by those of narrow domestic importance. It is in such a context, this book argues, that Larkin and Hughes returned to the old England, most notably to the themes of gradually vanishing pristine landscape and national myths and legends, to the archetypal English customs and conventions. It examines their poetry mainly from the perspective of Englishness, a burgeoning area of academic interest. Intricately connected with the values emanating from England as a geographical and socio-cultural space, Englishness as a concept is intrinsic to the identity of a people who gradually became globally powerful. The loss of empire dealt a severe blow to this sense of the self. This book explores the dynamics of the representation of this sense of loss and the frustration it produced in the poems of Larkin and Hughes.

The aim of the book is twofold: first, to provide an overview of the critical history of eccentricity; and secondly to conceptualise a notion that is often presented as a defining feature of the English “character”. It addresses the key issues raised by eccentricity and brings out interdisciplinary links between science, politics, literature and the arts: the sources and dissemination of the concept of eccentricity; its relationship with the English national character as historical and ideological constructs; the structural need for variation and divergence within accepted social norms; the paradoxical status of the eccentric as outsider – when eccentricity is transgressive and alienating – and as insider – eccentricity as socially acceptable deviation. Fundamentally eccentricity is a normative notion: being ex-centred enables eccentrics to delineate and negotiate boundaries between the margins and the centre, the canon and the norm. The contributors question the links between eccentricity, diversity and originality; the value of individual experience and character; and as a corollary, the struggle to retain individuality against increasing standardization, commoditisation and channelling within the normative discourse of normality. Eccentricity as display and performance is also tackled in several chapters, which focus on reception, image and (self)-representation, exhibition and voyeurism.

This book explores how literary texts envision England and respond to discourses and conceptions of Englishness and the English nation, especially in relation to gender and language. The essays discuss texts from the fifteenth to the twentieth century and bear witness to changing views of England and the English, highlighting the importance of religion, economy, landscape, the spectre of the “other” and language in this discourse. The volume pays attention to women writers’ reflection on the nation and the roles female figures play in male writers’ visions of nationhood. It brings into conversation less well-known voices like those of Osbern Bokenham, Thomas Deloney, Eleanor Davies and Jacquetta Hawkes with canonical authors—William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf—and opens a space for exploring the interplay of dominant and variant voices in the fashioning of England.