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This article intends to shed new light on the well-trodden theme of Englishness in The Remains of the Day by situating it within a cosmopolitan context. This article argues that this novel is not confined to the static concept of Englishness featuring butlerdom, the landed aristocracy, and the rural landscape, but exhibits how individuals react to an altered cosmopolitan milieu where Englishness falters and struggles to survive. Stevens’s motor tour is exactly a personal response to cosmopolitanism in the 1950s in the form of American cultural colonisation. His six-day expedition creates anti-cosmopolitan discourses by summoning up the national landscape ideology represented by the interwar automobile pilgrimage and Romantic pedestrianism. However, such an ideology is ironically dependent on cosmopolitan touristic mobility and subtly laced with cosmopolitan pressure. Stevens’s mobility is thus paradoxical, as it simultaneously affirms anti-cosmopolitan narratives and recognises the ubiquitous presence of cosmopolitan burdens. The paradox of mobility in a cosmopolitan context finds echoes in Ishiguro’s other fiction in a more general sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores English national identity through qualitative interviews with English-identifying voters in rural South-West England, amidst post-Brexit and COVID-19 uncertainties. Analysing 16 in-depth interviews, the study uncovers micro-level foundations of English identity, revealing a multifaceted view where participants consider it an absent identity. As members of the dominant cultural group, they define Englishness by their perceived 'normal,' distancing anything diverging from their norms as foreign. The study suggests a connection between English identity and reactive resentment towards perceived asymmetrical identity norms compared to neighbouring devolved nations. These findings shed light on the nuanced nature of English identity in rural areas and contribute to discussions about fostering a progressive and inclusive English identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Julian Barnes’s Arthur & George (2005) presents a fictional world based on real or historical events and characters. Barnes’s narrative is a re-examination of a historical case, a century later. The narrative depicts how, unlike all his defenders, including the internationally famous detective fiction writer Arthur Canon Doyle, biracial George strives to protect himself by primarily relying on the authority and superiority of British laws. As a solicitor, he defends law as a shared national asset which has the power to produce justice as well as to create a coherent and equal society. However, as a mixed-raced citizen, George is exposed to unsubstantiated accusations. His trial and imprisonment are not based on what he did but on what the communal mind supposes he did. Thus, as this paper argues, race is presented as an integral property of Englishness in Arthur & George. The central problem in this narrative is how the blind pursuit of a racially based understanding of Englishness can drive racial hatred and thus bring about injustice.

Written eighteen years apart Jez Butterworth's play Jerusalem (2010) [Jerusalem. Nick Hern Books] and Angela Carter's final novel Wise Children (1992) [Wise children. Vintage Classics] both attempt to recreate a sense of Englishness for the marginalised 'under-class' of post-imperial England without falling prey to nationalist interpretations. The two texts present raucous, vulgar protagonists who force an alternative rebellious form of proudly proletarian English identity into being. Where Carter's work is seen against the post-war backdrop of industrial decline, Butterworth's work is connected to a renewed interest in vernacular rural English culture. The action of both texts take place on one day, 23 April, making use of the fact that the day of national celebration, St George's Day, coincides with that of Shakespeare's birthday. Both texts, in fact, reclaim the mainstays of English national identity, Shakespeare and the myth of St George and recast them with characters who revel in the enactment of their anti-establishment identities. This paper will argue that the purposefully unruly behaviour of the protagonists of these texts continue the tradition of incivility as a form of social resistance in England, allowing the creation and assertion of an alternative Englishness that emanates from the margins and sees its roots in Shakespearean bawdiness and England's pagan past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This piece follows Stuart Ward's Untied Kingdom as it traverses a collapsing British Empire and an increasingly disunited United Kingdom to tell the complex history of Britishness in retreat across the world, mainly between 1945 and the early twenty-first century. It reviews some of the shifting meanings of Britishness that Ward charts in different contexts, different territories and at different moments in this history and the dwindling resonance of Britishness almost everywhere. It reviews other main themes that thread through the book: language, migration, race, belonging and unbelonging, nationalism, violence, and the impact of imperialism and colonialism on cultures, societies and mindsets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the ways in which pastiche, the past, and national iden- tity are portrayed and navigated in the concluding film of Edgar Wright’s The Cornetto Trilogy: The World’s End (2013). By focusing on the relationship between the use of the past and pastiche, it will be considered how they are employed to negotiate the notion of national identity. Through its comedic strategies and tropes, the film rebels against a homogenised version of Englishness based on mythical assumptions of the past and striving toward perfection. The dissection of the cinematic structure of pastiche will reveal a temporal framework questioning contemporary narratives of national identity. Moreover, the exploration of nostalgia and the past as places of retreat, as well as pastiche as a device of comedic criticism, enable Wright to offer a portrait of Englishness as struggling to recover its identity amidst a turbulent and apocalyptic time.

British and English national identities have long been considered to have porous boundaries whereby English individuals consider the terms more or less interchangeable. However, there is no empirical evidence to demonstrate whether primary feelings of either Britishness or Englishness are highly fluid within-individuals or whether individuals are consistent in their perceptions of their British or English identity. This is especially relevant in the post-Brexit referendum context where national identity is highly correlated with Brexit attitudes. Using panel data, we demonstrate that there is a notable degree of fluidity between identifying as British or English. This is higher than the fluidity between other national identities in the UK as well as more fluid than moving between any partisan or EU referendum identities. Remainers are more fluid than Leavers in their Englishness, whereas they are similar in the fluidity of their Britishness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over two decades, voters who emphasised their English identity played an influential role in the rise of UKIP and the Brexit Party, the Brexit referendum and the election of Conservative governments—a trend overlooked in most electoral analyses. Using twenty years of data from the British Election Study and British Social Attitudes Survey, as well as recent original surveys, the article explores the evolving political behaviour of national identity groups. It finds that 'more English' and 'more British' identifiers increasingly voted for different parties. The analysis also identifies growing differences in the demographics, social values and immigration attitudes of these groups, which descriptive and regression analysis suggests may underpin these divergent political behaviours. However, a fuller understanding of electoral behaviour must take account of ideas of national democracy and sovereignty. The electoral impact of both the characteristics of English identifying voters and ideas associated with English identity constitute 'political Englishness'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reviews myths about English identity, using 'myth' in a social scientific way, a truth held to be self‐evident; not something which is patently untrue. It argues that there must be three defining dimensions of English 'nationalism' if it is to be treated as such: first, whether there has been a significant increase in the proportion of people claiming 'English' as their national identity; second, how 'England' is treated as an 'imagined community'; and third, the degree to which the Conservative Party is the political vehicle for English nationalism. These dimensions are labelled the social, the cultural and the political. Only if there is sustained evidence for all three aspects might we consider English nationalism to be a significant phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between 1936 and 1969, around 1600 kneelers were produced for the new Anglican cathedral at Guildford in Surrey, southern England. This was a major collective devotional artwork, involving hundreds of embroiderers, mostly local women. The project was a distinctive form of community and collective artwork, that complicates established understandings of embroidery, craftwork, femininity and politics. It worked within guidelines for design and materials set by the interior designer Lady Prudence Maufe and her husband Sir Edward Maufe, the cathedral's architect. However, it also allowed for considerable autonomy and self-expression on the part of the volunteers. The kneeler collection has a rich and varied iconography that ranges from expected Christian symbolism to representations of modern technology and nuclear weaponry. What emerged over the length of the project was a complex expression of the worldview of post-war England, and particularly the England and Englishness of the Home Counties. This worldview attempted to combine faith in God with faith in technological progress, and to reconcile internationalism with confidence in British military power. The Guildford kneelers are best understood as a distinctive form of conservative modernity, an attempt to place the changes of the mid twentieth century into longer traditions of Christian worship and Englishness. • The 1600 kneelers at Guildford Cathedral are an important collective artwork. • Produced between 1936 and 1969 by hundreds of predominantly female craftworkers. • Challenges established progressive understandings of community artwork. • Iconography expresses the world-view of post-war middle-class England. • Interprets relationship between faith, technology and nationalism as conservative modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his British Academy lecture "Chaucer and Englishness" (1998), and elsewhere, Derek Pearsall argued that there is no evidence for a coherent sense of nationhood in late medieval England. This article reconsiders the issue by focusing not on ideological constructions of nationhood, but on simpler, more ordinary experiences of "national feeling or a sense of national identity," as reflected in the representation of England in Middle English romances, and the devices used by writers to create the sense of a homeland shared by narration and audience. Texts discussed include Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale, the alliterative Morte Arthure, Malory's Le Morte Darthur, Guy of Warwick, the Middle English Song of Roland, and Sir Degrevant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is an attempt to explain the Englishness/ Britishness dichotomy and evoke the sonorous, glorious attributes of historic heritage and patriotic emotion that belong to England rather than Britain. Englishness and Britishness can be viewed as two entities making a clear dissimilarity between an ethnic and a civic identity embraced in political, and social pride, and nationhood. Another aim of this article is to portray the translation strategies used to convey the meaning of these national identity concepts.

Much has been made of the rise of English nationalism, reflected in the strong association of 'being English' and voting Leave in the Brexit referendum in 2016. This article examines recent books on Englishness, arguing that this is a complex and nuanced matter embedded in accreted myths. If there is a thoroughgoing 'nationalism' emerging in England, it requires not only significant and long-lasting shifts in national identity, but a conception of 'England' as an imagined community which is robust and relevant to modern social and cultural life. Furthermore, it requires a nationalism which is part of wider and ongoing political project, rather than a short-term political expedient such as Conservative mobilisation post-Brexit. The article argues that an older debate in the 1960s and 1970s, between Tom Nairn and E.P. Thompson sheds significant light on the origins and nature of Englishness, such that it has progressive rather than reactionary potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peter Ackroyd’s historiographic metafictional novel Milton in America (2006) entails a critical return to history – critical in the sense that it questions the essence of historical knowledge and revisits the past in order to comment on the politics of national identity. Beneath a façade of historicity, the novel explores the continuity of English cultural identity and narrates a fictional story that centres on the conflict of Catholicism and Protestantism in the context of post-Restoration emigration of Puritans from England to New England. The “old faith”, although marginalized, continued to exist in post-Reformation England. The novel ties the significance of Catholicism to a thorough sense of Englishness. Catholic faith is shown as an ancient anchor of English identity. Peter Ackroyd delves into the collective memory of his race in search of a sense of commonality, believing in the continuity of English national identity. Challenging humanist assumptions about historical authenticity, the novel calls into question the idea of religious homogeneity, offering a different narrative as equally valuable.

In the last decade, Hugh Grant has been going through something resembling a career revival. After retreating from his roles as an English gentleman and romantic lead during the mid-2000s, Grant has recently re-emerged to garner critical acclaim in productions, such as Paddington 2 (2017), The Gentlemen (2019), and The Undoing (2020). What these roles have in common is that Grant has abandoned his days as prince charming in favour of a series of unlikeable characters and morally complex villains. This article analyses how this turn to villain signifies a renegotiation of Hugh Grant's star image and how this career revival stands into contact with his previous persona. Combining a close reading of some of Grant's recent films, together with a discussion of press discourse and interviews, I account for how Grant's villain performances are shaped and mediated by different artistic, commercial, and discursive forces. As such, I elucidate how Grant's renegotiation of his image helps distances himself from his previous career phase, is utilised by filmmakers to subvert audience expectations, and invites us to question the patriarchal and English imperialist attitudes that lay embedded in his previous performances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Resumés of Hugh Grant's career routinely note his performance as the repressed, upper-class Clive Durham in James Ivory's groundbreaking gay Edwardian drama Maurice (1987) as his breakthrough role. However, Grant's subsequent rise to global romcom stardom and celebrity since Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) has gradually occluded this earlier career phase from consideration as a significant moment in the formation of the 'Hugh Grant' persona. This research interrogates this interpretative gap by exploring the mediated self-/construction and sense-making interpretation of Grant's persona in and around Maurice as manifested in the film's 1987 media coverage. Also drawing on Ivory's casting files, and comparatively on media which focused on all three of Maurice's young 'unknown' male stars, the study explores how the 'Hugh Grant' of the late 1980s prefigures, denaturalises and unsettles later understandings of romcom 'Hugh Grant', including problematising his relation to New Man masculinities and foregrounding questions of class. The recent career narrative of Grant's 'new' turn towards serious roles is likewise challenged by attention to his tragicomic performance in Maurice, which his Jeremy Thorpe in A Very English Scandal (2018) would reflexively echo 31 years later. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Englishness has become a focal point of research and exploration, placing itself at the heart of debates within contemporary literary criticism. In this article, I will be taking Julian Barnes‘ England, England 1999 as a case study to highlight the workings of the aspects of authenticity and simulacra by attempting to break down the mechanisms that contribute to the rebranding of national identity as well as presenting an account of postmodern reflections of the novel. I also try to highlight the obvious influence of the author by French elements in terms of form and technique. My research touches upon the unreliability of memory, historical commodification and narrative techniques of perspectivation and characterisation amongst others, in order to showcase how Barnes manages through the amalgamation of particular techniques to denounce the artificiality of authenticity as a whole, and in focus, that of Englishness.

This article explores the ways in which pastiche, the past, and national identity are portrayed and navigated in the concluding film of Edgar Wright's The Cornetto Trilogy: The World's End (2013). By focusing on the relationship between the use of the past and pastiche, it will be considered how they are employed to negotiate the notion of national identity. Through its comedic strategies and tropes, the film rebels against a homogenised version of Englishness based on mythical assumptions of the past and striving toward perfection. The dissection of the cinematic structure of pastiche will reveal a temporal framework questioning contemporary narratives of national identity. Moreover, the exploration of nostalgia and the past as places of retreat, as well as pastiche as a device of comedic criticism, enable Wright to offer a portrait of Englishness as struggling to recover its identity amidst a turbulent and apocalyptic time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines how "quintessential" features of Englishness have been defined in two very different kinds of texts, John Fowles's "On Being English But Not British" and in Julian Barnes's novel England, England, both to be examined in relation to each other, to their specific chronotopes and to developing stages leading up to postmodernist irony and anti-foundationalism. The phrase "quintessences of Englishness," ironically used in Barnes's novel to refer to a new, updated, more authentic version of a country having fallen behind the times in a post-Thatcher age, invites a dialogue across several decades between two authors, Fowles and Barnes, and two attitudes toward constructions of national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural Rides, a collection of travel essays by William Cobbett, an outstanding essayist during the late period of British Romanticism, truthfully documents what he saw and heard as well as what he thought about the transformation of social and cultural values of the time when he traveled by horse in Southeast England from 1821 to 1826. Cobbett's nostalgic writing about the picturesque landscape of England profoundly touched the nerves of the Georgian and Victorian residents who were deeply trapped in the dilemma of commercial revolution and urbanization. And its unique nostalgic style has turned it into one of the most notable essay collections in the history of English literature. To this end, this article aims to interpret the causes and connotation of Cobbett's nostalgic travel writing, in light of Boym's reflective nostalgic theory, and find out how Cobbett represents the "new" and "old" elements of England by integrating Englishness and the local landscapes that he encountered during his travel, so as to refine his own concept of Englishness, which is a dynamic mechanism for generation constructed jointly by the traditional locality and new elements of the era. Also, the article shows how, based on such a premise, he articulates the vision of an ideal England with both rural serenity and urban prosperity, thus fulfilling his purpose of politicizing his literary aesthetics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines Lawrence’s contradictory attitudes to nationalism through his interest in the songs of the peoples in the places where he lived and their impact on his poetics and politics. The rhythms of English folk songs recur throughout his oeuvre, but it was the ‘Red Indian singing to the drum” (5L 570) that inspired his “song cycle” in The Plumed Serpent (1926). To what extent does this controversial novel reflect contemporary discourses of nationalism and/or cultural imperialism –or do his “Songs and Hymns of Quetzalcoatl” provide a voice for the people of Mexico and a musical programme for the reconstruction of the post-revolutionary Mexican nation?

This article contrasts three different ways of understanding contemporary British communal life: interpretive accounts based on quantitative political science which stress division and rising ethnocentrism; an account drawing on Arendtian political theory, which again stresses division and loneliness; and accounts developed from three very different contemporary novels: Sarah Moss's Ghost Wall (2018); Barney Farmer's Drunken Baker (2018); Bernard Cornwell's, Warlord (2020). Each explores the current bleak state of the UK in different ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers various ways in which St George, an important figure in mummers' plays before the Protestant Reformation, remained a presence in drama and popular entertainment long after one would have expected him to have disappeared. It notes his importance in the agricultural calendar, his strong association with fireworks, his popular designation as a specifically English saint, and some of the customs traditionally observed on his feast day of 23 April. It then moves on to consider some of the plays in which he is mentioned or alluded to, including works by Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Francis Beaumont, and John Fletcher, as well as a romance by Richard Johnson that was later dramatized, and culminates with references in three plays produced by members of the Cavendish family of Bolsover and Welbeck. It argues that referring to St George offered a way of talking about Englishness even when (perhaps especially when) that concept was contested, and also suggests that the legendary folk hero Guy of Warwick, presented in some texts as the son of St George, could sometimes act as a dramatic proxy for the saint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article analyzes the peculiarities of the process of the national conceptosphere development in Great Britain. It was found that the national conceptosphere is a set of categorized, standardized, processed concepts in the consciousness of the ethnic group. The conceptosphere expands with the enrichment of historical experience, culture of the nation, its art, science and literature. As a result of the analysis of modern linguistic sources it is determined that the main concepts of the British linguistic picture of the world are correlated with the features of the national character of the British. English people usually talk about themselves as quiet, reserved people who are dominated by common sense and who are not inclined to make rash decisions. At the same time, the Scots, Welsh and Northern Irish present themselves as the complete opposite, namely as romantic, impulsive and energetic people. In Victorian era such concept as "Englishness", or English national identity, arose. In that period new traditions, new educational system, and new standards of the English language were emerging. Thus, the political, economic, cultural events and shifts in the history of the British nation at the turn of the XIX and XX centuries led to the formation of the modern conceptosphere of the people. This period in the life of Great Britain gave new meanings to many culturally marked signs embodying the material and immaterial culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The post-war years were a period of introspection for British society as the nation endeavoured to remain fiercely insular yet became increasingly troubled by geopolitical relations reshaping the war-torn continent. Britain swiftly assumed the role of the reluctant European; their opposition to integration hindered by a destructive nostalgia for the past, the perceived erosion of cultural heritage and a sense of English exceptionalism. Beginning with a brief contextual analysis of the events leading to the 2016 EU Referendum, this article will argue that early warning signs of British antipathy were evident in literary responses to integration from the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) to the signing of the Maastricht Treaty which established the European Union.Through a close reading of selected fictions by key figures in this period, including Kingsley Amis, Nancy Mitford, Angus Wilson and Malcolm Bradbury, the article identifies how early warning signs of British antipathy to European integration were clearly evident in post-war literature. By reading Brexit backwards, the article excavates the historical roots of Euroscepticism implanted in the cultural imaginary.

Kynren is an outdoor spectacular pageantry performance which tells a tale of England, drawing on myth and history, to make several claims about Englishness and Britishness. It does so in the political wake, first, of constitutional crises in the UK centred around Brexit; and second, of debates around heritage, empire, race and nation which have been driven by responses to the Black Lives Matter movement. These themselves are manifestations of broader, global trends in which populist movements have attempted to reassert state-legitimacy through nationalism, heritage and culture. This paper explores, how Kynren affectively presents and discursively performs a narrative which puts place and landscape, and specifically the place and landscape of the peripheral region of County Durham in which it is located, at the heart of nation. We argue that the ways in which this narrative is authenticated performatively through the spectacular affective atmosphere of Kynren show how and which nationalist narratives resonate most readily in popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focusses on a trip made by John Stapylton Grey Pemberton in 1887 to two major battle sites from the Indian Rebellion of 1857, the Memorial Well Gardens, Kanpur, and the Residency ruins, Lucknow. Both sites, despite being present in a foreign country, were invented and transformed after the rebellion in acts of national remembrance as places of 'Englishness'. The selection of Pemberton's accounts are intended to explore how colonial spaces entered the discourse on 'Englishness', and how English colonists attempted to manifest their cultural identities and discipline the identities of their subordinates. By deciding to multiply its locations of identity beyond its own shores, the British Empire ensured that England would lose sovereign command of its 'own' spaces of identity. Kanpur and Lucknow were sites where England's narrative of belonging was de-stabilized and recreated, altered further by colonial subjects like Pemberton who came into contact with them. The idea of an autonomous English colonial space, separate from that of the colonised, needs to be replaced with a more fluid and mobile English subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout his five-decade career, David Bowie played the role of pop star, sophisticated actor, alien from Mars, Berlin dweller and more. His propensity for change established a star identity that challenged societal norms, creating a new representation of the English identity that was rarely seen in mainstream media. This research explores how David Bowie, framed as an actor rather than a musician, used his celebrity status to project new types of English characters on-screen.This article applies theories of Englishness, cultural studies and star and celebrity studies to Bowie's performance as Ziggy Stardust in the film Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars [The Motion Picture], tracking how his performance queers the stereotypical English nationality seen on screen during the post-war years. This research uses a mixture of semiotics and contextual analysis to explore how David Bowie, as a celebrated face in British pop culture, rejects the modern romanticism of Englishness and illustrates how Bowie's performance is constructed to challenge our understanding of Englishness through media texts and challenging the connotations associated with English masculinity, sexuality and otherness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During 2021, long‐standing concerns about racism in English cricket rose to the surface to become very public, political questions. For the purposes of clarity, this article begins by drawing a distinction between racism on the one hand and 'racial thinking' on the other. It suggests that racial thinking is related to, but analytically distinct from, and in fact prior to racism. It then goes on to develop a wider analysis of the historical connections between cricket, Englishness and racial thinking. With this in mind, the final section of the article draws on the preceding historical analysis to explore some of the more recent examples of racial thinking in cricket, and their implications for how we might approach the problem of racism in English cricket today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to prove that the sense of English identity and English nationalism were two key factors in the UK's decision to withdraw from the European Union and indicates the evolution of the Eurosceptic attitude in the UK to the point at which UK's citizens were divided by the referendum in 2016 into two categories: Brexiters and Remainers. In adopting a socio-cultural perspective, it provides an empirical analysis of a survey made in 2012 by the Future of England regarding English nationalism and the way such attitudes as Euroscepticism, Britishness or Englishness affected the results of the 2016 EU referendum in the UK. It starts with the main features of nationalism in UK's component countries (Black 2021) and ends with a few personal conclusions regarding the way the Eurosceptic attitude was used by the Brexiters' campaign in order to achieve its purpose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]