Gikandi explores the politics of identity to analyze how the colonial experience inspired narrative forms that changed the nature of the English identity by surveying the British imperial tradition since the nineteenth century. He provides detailed readings of the works of Trollope, Carlyle, and others; through the narratives of imperial women travelers such as Mary Kingsley and Mary Seacole; and through Africanist texts by Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene and postcolonialists such as Salman Rushdie and Joan Riley.

Gikandi explores the politics of identity to analyze how the colonial experience inspired narrative forms that changed the nature of the English identity by surveying the British imperial tradition since the nineteenth century. He provides detailed readings of the works of Trollope, Carlyle, and others; through the narratives of imperial women travelers such as Mary Kingsley and Mary Seacole; and through Africanist texts by Joseph Conrad, Graham Greene and postcolonialists such as Salman Rushdie and Joan Riley.

In the papers collected in this, the first volume of the Spatial Practices series, Englishness is reflected in the spaces it occupies or dwells in. Broadly influenced by a renewed and growing interest in questions of cultural identity, its emergence in Victorian theories and fictions of nationality, and the new cultural geography, the papers cover a rich variety of spaces and places which have been appropriated for cultural meanings: the rural countryside and farmland of the Home Counties in the early nineteenth century as Arcadian idyll in Cobbett, as the land to die for in war propaganda, and as nostalgia for a unified, organic English culture in Lawrence, Morton and Priestley’s travel writing, but also in the Shell Tourist Guides to motoring in rural England; English moorland; the sacred geographies of monuments in Hardy and others; the traditional seaside deconstructed in Martin Parr’s photography, and the sea as English Victorian imperial territory and its symbolic breezes in Froude’s travel writing. The English landscape is also a paradigm for the description of other places in D. H. Lawrence’s travel writing or for the colonial territory itself in Rushdie’s writing India, a displacement of other landscapes. This collection of papers examines the assumption that constructions of rural England provide the basis for an understanding of Englishness.

Why is English national identity so enigmatic and so elusive? Why, unlike the Scots, Welsh, Irish and most of continental Europe, do the English find it so difficult to say who they are? The Making of English National Identity, first published in 2003, is a fascinating exploration of Englishness and what it means to be English. Drawing on historical, sociological and literary theory, Krishan Kumar examines the rise of English nationalism and issues of race and ethnicity from earliest times to the present day. He argues that the long history of the English as an imperial people has, as with other imperial people like the Russians and the Austrians, developed a sense of missionary nationalism which in the interests of unity and empire has necessitated the repression of ordinary expressions of nationalism. Professor Kumar's lively and provocative approach challenges readers to reconsider their pre-conceptions about national identity and who the English really are.

Their principal objective is to explore the ways in which maps have interacted with society in England's past, to analyse the roles that maps have played and the uses to which they have been put. It is often a story of discontinuity rather than evolution, but the authors recognise many connections across the centuries, at the same time seeking to avoid too insular a view noting the influence of ongoing intellectual and cartographic developments in the rest of Europe."--BOOK JACKET.

Focuses on the literary origins of insular identity from local communities to the entire archipelago.

Defining essays on questions of newly-emerging English nationalism and the political importance of chivalric values and knightly obligations, as perceived by contemporary historians. Six of the greatest twelfth-century historians - William of Malmesbury, Henry of Huntingdon, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Geoffrey Gaimar, Roger of Howden, and Gerald of Wales - are analysed in this collection of essays, focusing on their attitudesto three inter-related aspects of English history. The first theme is the rise of the new and condescending perception which regarded the Irish, Scots and Welsh as barbarians; set against the background of socio-economic and cultural change in England, it is argued that this imperialist perception created a fundamental divide in the history of the British Isles, one to which Geoffrey of Monmouth responded immediately and brilliantly. The secondtheme treats chivalry not as a mere gloss upon the brutal realities of life, but as an important development in political morality; and it reconsiders some of the old questions associated with chivalric values and knightly obligations -home-grown products or imports from France? The third themeis the emergence of a new sense of Englishness after the traumas of the Norman Conquest, looking at the English invasion of Ireland and the making of English history. John Gillingham is Professor Emeritus, Department of History, London School of Economics.

This book describes a major literary culture caught in the act of becoming minor. In 1939, Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary, "Civilisation has shrunk." Her words captured not only the onset of World War II, but also a longer-term reversal of national fortune. The first comprehensive account of modernism and imperialism in England, A Shrinking Island tracks the joint eclipse of modernist aesthetics and British power from the literary experiments of the 1930s through the rise of cultural studies in the 1950s. Jed Esty explores the effects of declining empire on modernist form--and on the very meaning of Englishness. He ranges from canonical figures (T. S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf) to influential midcentury intellectuals (J. M. Keynes and J.R.R. Tolkien), from cultural studies pioneers (Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson) to postwar migrant writers (George Lamming and Doris Lessing). Focusing on writing that converts the potential energy of the contracting British state into the language of insular integrity, he argues that an anthropological ethos of cultural holism came home to roost in late-imperial England. Esty's interpretation challenges popular myths about the death of English literature. It portrays the survivors of the modernist generation not as aesthetic dinosaurs, but as participants in the transition from empire to welfare state, from metropolitan art to national culture. Mixing literary criticism with postcolonial theory, his account of London modernism's end-stages and after-lives provides a fresh take on major works while redrawing the lines between modernism and postmodernism.

It would be easy to assume that, in the eighteenth century, slavery and the culture of taste--the world of politeness, manners, and aesthetics--existed as separate and unequal domains, unrelated in the spheres of social life. But to the contrary, Slavery and the Culture of Taste demonstrates that these two areas of modernity were surprisingly entwined. Ranging across Britain, the antebellum South, and the West Indies, and examining vast archives, including portraits, period paintings, personal narratives, and diaries, Simon Gikandi illustrates how the violence and ugliness of enslavement actually shaped theories of taste, notions of beauty, and practices of high culture, and how slavery's impurity informed and haunted the rarified customs of the time. Gikandi focuses on the ways that the enslavement of Africans and the profits derived from this exploitation enabled the moment of taste in European--mainly British--life, leading to a transformation of bourgeois ideas regarding freedom and selfhood. He explores how these connections played out in the immense fortunes made in the West Indies sugar colonies, supporting the lavish lives of English barons and altering the ideals that defined middle-class subjects. Discussing how the ownership of slaves turned the American planter class into a new aristocracy, Gikandi engages with the slaves' own response to the strange interplay of modern notions of freedom and the realities of bondage, and he emphasizes the aesthetic and cultural processes developed by slaves to create spaces of freedom outside the regimen of enforced labor and truncated leisure. Through a close look at the eighteenth century's many remarkable documents and artworks, Slavery and the Culture of Taste sets forth the tensions and contradictions entangling a brutal practice and the distinctions of civility.