Teaching & Learning Guide for

Author's Introduction The question of what it means to be ‘English’, and the national and cultural identities nominated by this term, are of crucial significance at the present time. But the roots of this debate are to be located in previous eras and the issues can only be fully understood within this historical perspective. Historically, Englishness has been constituted by hybridity, adaptation and linguistic absorption, and these features are especially prominent characteristics of the nineteenth century. The conjuncture, during the long nineteenth century, of the industrial revolution, economic liberalism, and massive colonial expansion brought issues of nationhood and identity into focus as never before. Indeed, much of the current cultural and literary discussion of Englishness reaches back to the Victorian period, suggesting that an understanding of questions of landscape, empire and self are integral to the history of the national formation. Author Recommends I. Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). Argues that Englishness is largely defined through a sense of place, such as the rose‐garden, cathedral close or the cricket field. Such locales serve to fix what is unfixed and threatened by a fear of the Other. The linguistic theories propounded in the eighteenth century become embodied, for instance, in Wordsworth's poetry with its ‘redemptive localism’, and subsequently in the paintings of Turner and essays of his disciple, John Ruskin. The sense of a localised and mnemonic Englishness were tested and redefined, for instance, in relation to the Governor Eyre controversy with its haunting sense of the ‘primitive’ unsettling the boundaries of the nation. R. Colls and P. Dodd, Englishness: Politics and Culture 1880–1920 (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1986). This collection of essays marked a significant intervention, during the Thatcherite 1980s, in debates around the concept of Englishness. In the period under consideration the new relation between university and public school, the reconceptualisation of ‘manliness’, and the invitation to the ruling classes to participate in the national culture went hand in hand with the colonisation of the ‘other’ and with concerns for linguistic purity. Contributors made important contributions, for example, to the definition of a semi‐mythicised ‘South Country’ and to the literary, musical, artistic and architectural manifestations of that dream‐land. B. Doyle, English and Englishness (London: Routledge, 1989). An expert account of the rise of English in the nineteenth century as an authentic subject of university study and as a challenge to the hegemony of classics in the educational curriculum. Doyle shows how this development went hand‐in‐hand with increasing professionalisation and a sense of national identity. The valued qualities in the mid‐Victorian period were masculinity, activity and concretion allied to notions of racial purity read under the imprint of Social Darwinism and one of the consequences of this ideological formation was the marginalisation of women. A. Easthope, Englishness and National Culture (London: Routledge, 1998). A vigorous and entertaining study which argues that nationalism is a product of modernity, but is also generated ‘from below’, and not simply ideological. The much‐vaunted binary opposition of speech community‐modernity is imaginary and is based upon notions of a non‐sexual collectivity. All identity is ‘plural and disjunct’, but the operation of Standard English serves to extend hegemony over regional variants. The relation between culture is problematised here and the individual's relation to ‘national desire’ inventively explored. The fundamental key to Englishness is perceived as being founded in the empiricist tradition which is manifest in both journalism and historical writing, and takes the literary form of an ‘English’ anti‐modernism. R. Ebbatson, An Imaginary England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005). A theoretically inflected study which seeks to reveal the binary tropes underpinning national identity whilst demonstrating how these were perpetually undermined by the liminal, colonial and marginal. Argues that Victorian literature projects and reinflects the nation‐state and a wider imperial moment. Examination of the political unconscious of a variety of symptomatic non‐canonical texts from 1840–1920 reveals a tendency to identify England as a ‘utopian non‐place’. Thus, for instance, Tennyson's English Idylls are marked by traces of difference and alterity related to the moment of Chartism, Richard Jefferies’ writing is imbricated with issues of land‐ownership and class, whilst some of Hardy's lesser‐known texts explore gender and imperial issues often overlooked in his work. These elements point forward to later developments in literary definitions of Englishness (‘Q’, Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, D. H. Lawrence) in the period up to the Great War. D. Gervais, Literary Englands (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). An elegant study which traces pastoral notions of Englishness in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Gervais demonstrates how the idealised image of labour became intrinsic to Englishness so that the old yeoman class was identified specifically with nationhood. Whilst chivalric notions in Tennyson, Ruskin or Disraeli were essentially backward‐looking, Morris's utopian thinking, like that of Richard Jefferies, offers a re‐vision of England as ‘a place of skilful and determined work’. Later representations of England in Housman, Kipling and the Edwardians, reinflect and modify this structure of feeling under the impress of empire and war. S. Gikandi, Maps of Englishness (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). A significant book which presupposes that Englishness is the product of the colonial project. Englishness is elicited in the gap between metropolis and centre, and this is exemplified in Victorian travel writing (Mary Seacole, Mary Kinglsey, J. A. Froude, Trollope). The imaginary spectacles of the imperial centre, such as the Jubilee celebrations or the colonial exhibitions, served to create a link with the periphery but were undermined by ‘the rise of the black subject’ exemplified in the Morant Bay uprising or the Sepoy Rebellion. The contested nature of Englishness in its fraught relation with the colony leads dialectically to the emphasis upon the liminal and ‘primitive’ in twentieth‐century writing. K. Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Argues that English identities were founded in the gaining of empire rather than any ‘authentic’ quality of Englishness per se. The issue of Englishness was primarily one of state policy rather than nationhood. Only when the empire was beginning to come under threat could full‐blooded nationalism emerge as a potent force, so that the nation‐state is a purely modern phenomenon and can be traced to the critical period 1880–1920. This is a vigorously argued and cogent study, though probably too prescriptive in ruling out earlier ‘moments’ of Englishness, such as the seventeenth century; but the line of thinking is important, and the link between national identity and empire well made. J. Lucas, England and Englishness (London: Hogarth, 1990). Lucas trenchantly identifies poetic tradition and pastoral vision with an openly reactionary politics, and demonstrates his argument in a powerful reading of class and power relations in Clare's poetry, an oeuvre interpreted as voicing the views of the outsider or ‘outlaw’. By contrast Tennyson's chivalric notion of Englishness leads inevitably towards retreat, defeat and seclusion. D. Matless, Landscape and Englishness (London: Reaktion, 2003). Underlying opposing arguments about appropriate land‐use in the countryside are deep issues of soci

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Art · British Empire · Colonialism · Empire · Identity (music · Literature · Localism · National identity · Poetry · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Globalization and Cultural Identity · History · Law