Fashioning England and the English

Literature, Nation, Gender

Rahel Orgis, Matthias Heim, Rahel Orgis, Matthias Heim

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319921266
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

© The Author(s) 2018

Rahel Orgis and Matthias Heim (eds.)Fashioning England and the Englishhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92126-6_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Rahel Orgis¹ and Matthias Heim²

(1)

University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland

(2)

University of Neuchâtel, Neuchâtel, Switzerland

Matthias Heim

End Abstract

In the eighteenth century, Thomas Hollis (1720–1774) confidently signed the precious books he disseminated in Europe and the American colonies with the phrase, “An Englishman, a Lover of Liberty, Citizen of the World.” Encapsulated in this formula is Hollis’s view of what should characterise an Englishman and a vision of England’s ideal role in the world as a model of Republican liberty. ¹ The attempt to circumscribe the nation, its human representatives and their place in the world is as topical now as it was in the eighteenth century—witness one of Theresa May’s first major speeches as prime minister, in Birmingham on 5 October 2016. However, the possibility of Hollis’s easy double allegiance to the nation and the world at large was negated by May, who made the controversial statement that “If you believe you’re a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word citizenship means” (2016). ² May’s statement implies the need to refocus on the national community and to redefine the relation between the national community and the world. Moreover, her emphasis on the “spirit of citizenship” invokes the relation between the individual and the national community. These three political and cultural issues, the envisioning of a national community, the individual’s relation to the national community and its relation to the world, that is, other communities, are of concern beyond immediately political discourse and manifest themselves in literary texts across periods and genres. It is these literary projections of England and Englishness, which both reflect on and inform political and cultural discourse that the present volume primarily explores.

In the case of England, the endeavour to delineate the nation, national characteristics and the nation’s relation to the world is complicated by England’s changing relations to its immediate neighbours, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, and the historical alterations in England’s own territorial and political constitution. From an independent kingdom with colonial pretensions in the Middle Ages, England over the centuries developed into the heartland of the British Empire while the political relations between the constituents of the UK continued to be renegotiated. Devolution efforts persisted beyond the dissolution of the British Empire, leading to the debate over England’s own parliamentary representation within the UK. Such profound political changes in a nation’s constitution cannot but inform how the nation in question is envisioned or what is understood by the very term nation. Yet, paradoxically, the ideological fashioning of a nation and its characteristics, inhabitants and political relations often fails to reference territorial and political realities. Instead, as the contributions to this volume illustrate, other parameters are invoked in projections of the nation, such as religion, landscape or language. Indeed, as Benedict Anderson in his classical study Imagined Communities notes, while a nation is necessarily conceived of as “limited,” these limits “b[ear] none but the most fortuitous relationship to existing political boundaries” (2006, 46). In analogy to Anderson’s statement, the present volume concerns itself foremost with the projected limits of the national community. Rather than focusing on the “existing political boundaries” or the “fortuitous relationship” between reality and projection, the volume investigates how writers envision England and Englishness in literature at different moments in time.

The difficulty of circumscribing England and Englishness is epitomised in the unstable and often lacking distinction between England and Britain from the Middle Ages to the present day. Whereas May in her 2016 speech consistently referred to Britain and treated it as “a country,” insisting on her will “to preserve our proud, historic Union,” all her more specific geographical references except one to Wales were England-centred. This was due in part to the location, Birmingham, perhaps, but it nevertheless reveals the complex terminological and ideological overlap between notions of Britain and England. As Lynn Staley succinctly puts it in connection with medieval and early modern texts, “More often than not, to say Britain is to mean England” (2012, 10). ³ If Britain and England were often and continue to be used interchangeably, ⁴ this is not always the case, raising the question what is at stake when writers invoke England or Englishness in their texts. ⁵ David Minden Higgins notes regarding the Romantic period, “Sometimes writers of the period say ‘English’ when they mean ‘British’ (and vice versa), sometimes it is not clear what they mean, and sometimes when they say ‘English’, they mean exactly that and not Scottish, Irish, Welsh, or British” (2014, 10). Higgins therefore concludes that “Englishness was a heterogeneous and unstable category in the Romantic period, and always inflected by alterity” (2014, 9)—an observation that also applies to other historical periods.

Since the devolution negotiations and in the context of Brexit discussions, England-centred national(ist) discourse has gained prominence. If perhaps the question how to envisage England as an independent political and cultural unity poses itself more urgently at present than before the turn of the millennium, this national(ist) discussion over Englishness and English nationhood continues an ongoing debate over national characteristics, identity and nationhood that can be traced in literature over the centuries. The numerous publications on the subject of the last twenty years testify both to the difficulties of delineating England and Englishness and to the ubiquitous nature of national discourse as these concepts are continually renegotiated. ⁶ Thus, Claire Westall and Michael Gardiner note that:

Although the English Question gave rise in the 2000s to a boom of books addressing the received properties of English culture, many of these were problematic. For one thing, rather than asking structural questions about England and government they often pulled back to a ‘listing’ tendency of received or imagined English properties[.] (2013, 5–6)

Such a listing of “English properties” implies a more stable conception of Englishness and English nationhood than detailed historical and literary enquiry into the subject warrants. Indeed, as a number of period-focused publications show, a concern with England and Englishness is evident well before the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, traditionally associated with the rise of the nation states. Scholars like Andrew Hadfield (1994), Richard Helgerson (1992, 4), Claire McEachern (1996), and Cathy Shrank (2004), for instance, emphasise the impact of the break from Rome on early modern national discourse (cf. Shrank 2004, 8), whereas Anthony Hastings (1997), Michael T. Clanchy (2014), and R. R. Davies (2000) locate “English nation formation” even earlier (Oldenburg 2014, 187, n. 20), pushing back in time the emergence of a national consciousness. However, these studies also emphasise the difference between how concepts like the nation or nationalism were understood in different historical periods. Andrew Escobedo argues that “Renaissance nationalism differed importantly from later manifestations” and also from medieval nationalism (2004, 11, 13), and Staley insists that “any idea of nation in [the medieval and Tudor] period must be detached from more modern notions of nationalism or imperialism” (2012, 9). ⁷ Hence, although the basic question “what are or should England and the English be like” remains the same over time, the understanding of nationalism and the nation evolves in accordance with the changing state of England in history and the changing parameters informing the conceptions of England and Englishness.

Moreover, even within historical periods, one may find “a plurality of nationalist discourses” (Helgerson 1992, 300). Scott K. Oldenburg asserts, for example, that “throughout the early modern period, the nature of English identity was not singular but contested” (2014, 6). It follows that, in the words of David Gervais, “A full treatment of ‘Englishness’ would involve many different Englands” (1993, xiii). However, while critics underline the uneven development and instability of English national consciousness, ⁸ there...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. (Re)Forming the Commonwealth
• Part II. Importing and Exporting Texts and Ideologies
• Part III. Explorations of Belonging
• Back Matter