Englishness

Ideas of Englishness, and of the English nation, have become a matter of renewed interest in recent years as a result of threats to the integrity of the United Kingdom and the perceived rise of that unusual thing, English nationalism. Interrogating the idea of an English nation, and of how that might compare with other concepts of nationhood, this book’s wide-ranging, comparative and historical approach to understanding the particular nature of Englishness and English national identity, will appeal to scholars of sociology, cultural studies and history with interests in English and British national identity and debates about England’s future place in the United Kingdom.

Until the Brexit referendum, there was widespread doubt as to whether English nationalism existed at all, at least beyond a small fringe. Since then, it has come to be regarded an obvious explanation for the vote to Leave the European Union. Subsequent opinion polls have raised doubts about the extent of continuing English commitment to the Union of the United Kingdom itself. Yet even as Englishness is apparently reshaping Britain's place in world and perhaps, ultimately, the state itself, it remains poorly understood. In this book Ailsa Henderson and Richard Wyn Jones draw on data from the Future of England Survey, a specially commissioned public attitudes survey programme exploring the political implications of English identity, to make new and original arguments about the nature of English nationalism. They demonstrate that English nationalism is emphatically not a rejection of Britain and Britishness. Rather, English nationalism combines a sense of grievance about England's place within the United Kingdom with a fierce commitment to a particular vision of Britain's past, present, and future. Understanding its Janus-faced nature - both England and Britain - is key not only to understanding English nationalism, but also to understanding the ways in which it is transforming British politics.

'Englishness' is by no means the unchanging quality of those living in the territory that has come to be England, but a concept that has been made and remade throughout history, expressing itself through existing symbols and ideas. Since its first publication in 1987 this collection has been regarded as a major work on English national identity as it evolved during the period 1880-1920 and has had a significant impact on writing and research. It is a classic text for students of modern British history and courses in politics, sociology and literature. This updated edition of Englishness contains a new introduction by Robert Colls and Philip Dodd, which sets the work in the context of research done since its original publication, and an afterword by Will Self which relates it to current debates on Britain as a multinational state. This important collection contains ideas that are still pertinent today, making it essential reading for students and scholars alike.

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 fringeâ "Scotland in particularâ "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.

In the papers collected in this, the first volume of the Spatial Practices series, Englishness is reflected in the spaces it occupies or dwells in. Broadly influenced by a renewed and growing interest in questions of cultural identity, its emergence in Victorian theories and fictions of nationality, and the new cultural geography, the papers cover a rich variety of spaces and places which have been appropriated for cultural meanings: the rural countryside and farmland of the Home Counties in the early nineteenth century as Arcadian idyll in Cobbett, as the land to die for in war propaganda, and as nostalgia for a unified, organic English culture in Lawrence, Morton and Priestley’s travel writing, but also in the Shell Tourist Guides to motoring in rural England; English moorland; the sacred geographies of monuments in Hardy and others; the traditional seaside deconstructed in Martin Parr’s photography, and the sea as English Victorian imperial territory and its symbolic breezes in Froude’s travel writing. The English landscape is also a paradigm for the description of other places in D. H. Lawrence’s travel writing or for the colonial territory itself in Rushdie’s writing India, a displacement of other landscapes. This collection of papers examines the assumption that constructions of rural England provide the basis for an understanding of Englishness.

Faced with the demise of their country on the world stage, with the Americanization of their society and with the prospect of integration into Europe, many people in postwar-Britain, and in particular in England, began to look more closely at their national identity. Using literature as a source material, this study investigates postwar images of Englishness as they are defined in relation not only to ‘Americans’ and ‘Europeans’, but also to other foreigners: the ‘Arabs’ and the ‘Russians.’ In the context of the Anglo-American novel particular regard is given to Englishness in Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One and David Lodge’s Changing Places. Subsequently the book focuses on that peculiarly English genre ‘the invasion story’, tales in which Englishness comes under direct attack from evil plotters from abroad. While the history of the genre is discussed at some length, detailed attention is paid to images of Englishness in Angus Wilson’s The Old Men at the Zoo (united European forces invade a Euro-recalcitrant Britain), Anthony Burgess’ 1985 (Arab infiltrators prepare to Islamize the English) and Kingsley Amis’ Russian Hide and Seek (after a period of occupation the Russians attempt to give the English back their Englishness).

In the papers collected in this, the first volume of the Spatial Practices series, Englishness is reflected in the spaces it occupies or dwells in. Broadly influenced by a renewed and growing interest in questions of cultural identity, its emergence in Victorian theories and fictions of nationality, and the new cultural geography, the papers cover a rich variety of spaces and places which have been appropriated for cultural meanings: the rural countryside and farmland of the Home Counties in the early nineteenth century as Arcadian idyll in Cobbett, as the land to die for in war propaganda, and as nostalgia for a unified, organic English culture in Lawrence, Morton and Priestley's travel writing, but also in the Shell Tourist Guides to motoring in rural England; English moorland; the sacred geographies of monuments in Hardy and others; the traditional seaside deconstructed in Martin Parr's photography, and the sea as English Victorian imperial territory and its symbolic breezes in Froude's travel writing. The English landscape is also a paradigm for the description of other places in D. H. Lawrence's travel writing or for the colonial territory itself in Rushdie's writing India, a displacement of other landscapes. This collection of papers examines the assumption that constructions of rural England provide the basis for an understanding of Englishness.

The controversial British writer Ford Madox Ford (1873-1939) is increasingly recognized as a major presence in early twentieth-century literature. International Ford Madox Ford Studies has been founded to reflect the recent resurgence of interest in him. Each volume is based upon a particular theme or issue; each will relate aspects of Ford’s work, life, and contacts, to broader concerns of his time. Ford is best-known for his fiction, especially The Good Soldier, long considered a modernist masterpiece; and Parade’s End, which Anthony Burgess described as ‘the finest novel about the First World War’; and Samuel Hynes has called ‘the greatest war novel ever written by an Englishman’. These works, together with his trilogy The Fifth Queen, about Henry VIII and Katharine Howard, are centrally concerned with the idea of Englishness. All these, and other works across Ford’s prolific oeuvre, are studied here. Critics of Edwardian and Modernist literature have been increasingly turning to Ford’s brilliant 1905 experiment in Impressionism, The Soul of London, as an exemplary text. His trilogy England and the English (of which this forms the first part) provides a central reference-point for this volume, which presents Ford as a key contributor to Edwardian debates about the ‘Condition of England’. His complex, ironic attitude to Englishness makes his approach stand out from contemporary anxieties about race and degeneration, and anticipate the recent reconsideration of Englishness in response to post-colonialism, multiculturalism, globalization, devolution, and the expansion and development of the European Community. Ford’s apprehension of the major social transformations of his age lets us read him as a precursor to cultural studies. He considered mass culture and its relation to literary traditions decades before writers like George Orwell, the Leavises, or Raymond Williams. The present book initiates a substantial reassessment, to be continued in future volumes in the series, of Ford’s responses to these cultural transformations, his contacts with other writers, and his phases of activity as an editor working to transform modern literature. From another point of view, the essays here also develop the project established in earlier volumes, of reappraising Ford’s engagement with the city, history, and modernity.