What did it mean in the first half of this century to say `I am English?' A Practical Sourcebook on National Identity is a unique collection of extracts from writing of the era, all of which in some way raise this question. Drawn from a wide range of sources including letters, diaries, journalism, fiction, poems, parliamentary speeches and government reports, the volume is divided into five sections: * The Ideas and Ideals of Englishness * Versions of Rural England * War and National Identity * Culture and Englishness * Domestic and Urban Englands The editors provide an introduction to each section and conclude with suggested study activities and further reading. It also contains a chronology and bibliography, completing the framework for study. A Practical Sourcebook on National Identity is a fascinating collection which will not only be essential and accessible reading for students, but will also appeal to anyone who has ever asked what it means to become part of a national identity.

What did it mean in the first half of this century to say `I am English?' A Practical Sourcebook on National Identity is a unique collection of extracts from writing of the era, all of which in some way raise this question. Drawn from a wide range of sources including letters, diaries, journalism, fiction, poems, parliamentary speeches and government reports, the volume is divided into five sections: * The Ideas and Ideals of Englishness * Versions of Rural England * War and National Identity * Culture and Englishness * Domestic and Urban Englands The editors provide an introduction to each section and conclude with suggested study activities and further reading. It also contains a chronology and bibliography, completing the framework for study. A Practical Sourcebook on National Identity is a fascinating collection which will not only be essential and accessible reading for students, but will also appeal to anyone who has ever asked what it means to become part of a national identity.

Foreign accents in fiction are a common stylistic instrument of marking a character as the ‘Other’ and conveying national stereotypes in literature. This study investigates in a qualitative analysis the linguistic characteristics of non-native fictional speech, with a specific focus on the English Renaissance, the Victorian Age and the 20th-century war decades. After examining the concept of national identity and the image of the foreigner in these eras, the study undertakes an in-depth linguistic analysis of a literary corpus of drama and prose. Recurring patterns in non-native fictional speech are uncovered and set into relation with the socio-cultural background of the respective work, which leads to intriguing findings about the changing image of the foreigner and the phenomenon of linguistic stereotying in English literature.

An original mapping of women's writing in the 1940s and 1950s, this book looks at Englishness and national identity in women's writing and includes writing from Scotland, Wales, Ireland the Indian subcontinent and Africa. The authors discussed include Virginia Woolf, Daphne Du Maurier, Doris Lessing and Muriel Spark.

From the trials of families experiencing divorce, as in Anne Fine’s Madame Doubtfire, to the childcare problems highlighted in Jacqueline Wilson’s Tracy Beaker, it might seem that the traditional family and the ideals that accompany it have long vanished. However, in The Family in English Children’s Literature, Ann Alston argues that this is far from the case. She suggests that despite the tales of family woe portrayed in children’s literature, the desire for the happy, contented nuclear family remains inherent within the ideological subtexts of children’s literature. Using 1818 as a starting point, Alston investigates families in children’s literature at their most intimate, focusing on how they share their spaces, their ideals of home, and even on what they eat for dinner. What emerges from Alston’s study are not so much the contrasts that exist between periods, but rather the startling similarities of the ideology of family intrinsic to children’s literature. The Family in English Children’s Literature sheds light on who maintains control, who behaves, and how significant children’s literature is in shaping our ideas about what makes a family "good."

Much attention has focused on the imperial gaze at colonised peoples, cultures, and lands. But, during and after the British Empire, what have writers from those cultures made of England, the English, and issues of race, gender, class, ethnicity, and desire when they have travelled, expatriated, or emigrated to England? This question is addressed through studies of the domestic novel and the Bildungsroman , and through essays on Mansfield, Rhys, Stead, Emecheta, Lessing, Naipaul, Emecheta, Rushdie and Dabydeen.

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.

This book presents how Nation and Narrative are bound together through the figure of the "N/native" as it appears in the non-fictional writings of Cornelia Sorabji, Grazia Deledda, Zitkála-Šá, Virginia Woolf, Victoria Ocampo, and Gwendolyn Bennett. It addresses two questions: How did women writers in the early twentieth century tackle the entangled roots of political and cultural citizenship from which crises of belonging arise? How do their narrative negotiations of those crises inform modernist practice and modernity, then and now? The "N/native" moves between "born in" and "first in" in the context of the modern nation-state. In the dominant discourses of post-imperial as well as de-colonizing nations, "Native" is relegated to Time (static or fetishized through nostalgia and romance). History is envisioned as active and contoured, associated with motion and progress, which the "native" inhabits and for whom citizenship is a political as well as a temporal attribute. The six authors' identities as Native, settler, indigenous, immigrant, or native-citizen, are formed from their gendered, racialized, and classed locations in their respective nations. Each author negotiates the intertwined strands of Time and History by mobilizing the "N/native" to reclaim citizenship (cultural-political belonging). This study reveals how their lineage, connections to land, experiences in learning (education), and their labor generate their narratives. The juxtaposition of the six writers keeps in focus the asymmetries in their responses to their times, and illustrates how relevant women's/feminist production were, and are in today's versions of the same urgent debates about heightened nativisms and nationalisms

A major new survey of literature in England during the first half of the twentieth century, Chris Baldick places modernist with non-modernist writings, high art with low entertainment. The Modern Movement ranges broadly covering psychological novels, war poems, detective stories, satires, children's books, and other literary forms evolving in response to the new anxieties and exhilarations of twentieth-century life.

The Oxford English Literary History is the new century's definitive account of a rich and diverse literary heritage that stretches back for a millennium and more. Each of these groundbreaking volumes offers a leading scholar's considered assessment of the authors, works, cultural traditions, events, and the ideas that shaped the literary voices of their age. The series will enlighten and inspire not only everyone studying, teaching, and researching in English Literature, but all serious readers. This exciting new volume provides a freshly inclusive account of literature in England in the period before, during, and after the First World War. Chris Baldick places the modernist achievements of Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and James Joyce within the rich context of non-modernist writings across all major genres, allowing 'high' literary art to be read against the background of 'low' entertainment. Looking well beyond the modernist vanguard, Baldick highlights the survival and renewal of realist traditions in these decades of post-Victorian disillusionment. Ranging widely across psychological novels, war poems, detective stories, satires, and children's books, The Modern Movement provides a unique survey of the literature of this turbulent time.