These Englands: A Conversation on National Identity

Description

The term 'conversation' is one of today's jargon terms. This book explores in depth what conversation means in national terms. Its premise is that to be English is to participate in a conversation about the country's history, politics, culture and society. The conversation changes, of course, but there is also continuity which illustrates a distinct tradition. It is a conversation, the book argues, which requires the plural notion of these Englands rather than the singularity of this England. Englishness, then, is the tone, register and idiom of it subject matters, its anxieties and certainties, differences and commonalities. The book explores the English conversation through historical, political, literary and popular voices and tries to identify the character of contemporary Englishness. -- .

Arthur Aughey is Professor of Politics at the University of Ulster, Jordanstown Christine Berberich is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Portsmouth

A most thoughtful set of essays offering 'intimations' of that most nebulous thing, English national identity. They approach this will-o-the-wisp from several directions - sociological, political, literary - and together weave a conversation of an Oakeshottian kind, intellectual as well as pleasing. Indeed, the claim of the editors that England cannot be grasped in definitions, manifestos and deductions but only in an open-ended conversational flow seems most apt. -- .