Performing Englishness examines the growth in popularity and profile of the English folk arts in the first decade of the twenty-first century. In the only study of its kind, the authors explore how the folk resurgence speaks to a broader explosion of interest in the subject of English national and cultural identity. Combining approaches from British cultural studies and ethnomusicology, the book draws on ethnographic fieldwork, interviews with central figures of the resurgence and close analysis of music and dance as well as visual and discursive sources. Its presentation of the English case study calls for a rethinking of concepts such as revival and indigeneity. It will be of interest to students and scholars in cultural studies, ethnomusicology and related disciplines.

Angelia Poon examines how British colonial authority in the nineteenth century was predicated on its being rendered in ways that were recognizably 'English'. Reading a range of texts by authors that include Charlotte Brontë, Mary Seacole, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, and H. Rider Haggard, Enacting Englishness in the Victorian Period focuses on the strategies - narrative, illustrative, and rhetorical - used to perform English subjectivity during the time of the British Empire. Characterising these performances, which ranged from the playful, ironic, and fantastical to the morally serious and determinedly didactic, was an emphasis on the corporeal body as not only gendered, racialised, and classed, but as (in)visible, desiring, bound in particular ways to space, and marked by certain physical stylizations and ways of thinking. As she shines a light on the English subject in the act of being and becoming, Poon casts new light on the changing historical circumstances and discontinuities in the performances of Englishness to disclose both the normative power of colonial authority as well as the possibilities for resistance.

This broad-based collection of essays is an introduction both to the concerns of contemporary folklore scholarship and to the variety of forms that folk performance has taken throughout English history. Combining case studies of specific folk practices with discussion of the various different lenses through which they have been viewed since becoming the subject of concerted study in Victorian times, this book builds on the latest work in an ever-growing body of contemporary folklore scholarship. Many of the contributing scholars are also practicing performers and bring experience and understanding of performance to their analyses and critiques. Chapters range across the spectrum of folk song, music, drama and dance, but maintain a focus on the key defining characteristics of folk performance – custom and tradition – in a full range of performances, from carol singing and sword dancing to playground rhymes and mummers' plays. As well as being an essential reference for folklorists and scholars of traditional performance and local history, this is a valuable resource for readers in all disciplines of dance, drama, song and music whose work coincides with English folk traditions.

Performing Folk Songs is the first full-length volume to explore English folk singing from the perspective of performance studies. Using archival sources, family repertoire and recorded performances of interviewees, this book argues that archives and repertoires are produced in sensory environments and through embodied encounters. Autoethnography, sensory ethnography, life-writing and landscape writing are used to explore the affective and emotional aspects of learning songs 'by heart'. Drawing on her experience as a folk singer, Bennett contributes to discourse on English folk traditions in the 21st century and brings performance scholarship to the contemporary folk song resurgence. In analyzing the performance of English folk songs in the affective context of the archive and the landscape, the book engages with and contributes original insights to scholarship on folk music, performance studies, affect theory, cultural geography and intangible cultural heritage studies.

A sweeping history of how ecological challenges have shaped English society over the last sixty years. England’s Green explores how environmental concerns have shaped and reflected English national identity since the 1960s. From agriculture to leisure, climate change, folklore, archaeology, and religion, David Matless shows how national environmental debates connect to the local, regional, global, and postcolonial worlds. Moving across a breadth of material including government policy, popular music, ecological polemic, and television comedy, England’s Green shows the richness and complexity of English environmental culture. Along the way, Matless tracks how today’s debates over climate and nature, land, and culture, have been molded by events over the past sixty years.

Conrad's fiction is characterized by an enduring recourse to the performing arts for metaphor, allegory, symbol, and subject matter; however, this aspect of Conrad's non-dramatic works has only recently begun to come into its own among literary critics. In response to this seminal moment, Joseph Conrad and the Performing Arts offers an exciting, interdisciplinary forum for one of the most interesting and nascent areas of Conrad studies. Adopting a variety of theoretical approaches, the contributors examine major and neglected works within the context of the performing arts: cultural performance in Conrad's Malay fiction; Conrad's use and parody of popular traditions such as melodrama, Grand-Guignol, and commedia dell'arte; Conrad's engagement with the visual culture of early cinema; Conrad's interest in the motifs of shadowgraphy (shadow plays); Conrad's relationship to Shakespeare; and the enduring influence of opera on his work. Taken together, the essays provide, through solid scholarship and richly provocative speculation, new insight into Conrad's oeuvre, and invite future dialogue in the burgeoning field of Conrad and the performing arts.

Mad Dogs and Englishness connects English popular music with questions about English national identities, featuring essays that range across Bowie and Burial, PJ Harvey, Bishi and Tricky. The later years of the 20th century saw a resurgence of interest in cultural and political meanings of Englishness in ways that continue to resonate now. Pop music is simultaneously on the outside and inside of the ensuing debates. It can be used as a mode of commentary about how meanings of Englishness circulate socially. But it also produces those meanings, often underwriting claims about English national cultural distinctiveness and superiority. This book's expert contributors use trans-national and trans-disciplinary perspectives to provide historical and contemporary commentaries about pop's complex relationships with Englishness. Each chapter is based on original research, and the essays comprise the best single volume available on pop and the English imaginary.

An examination of how regional identities are reflected in texts from medieval England.

Looking East examines how English encounters with the Ottoman Empire helped shape national identities and imperial ambitions. Engagingly written in an accessible style, this book demonstrates how the so-called 'conflict of civilizations' separating the Muslim East from the Christian West is a false and dangerous myth.

This book explores how the English rural has been represented in contemporary theatre and performance. Exploring a range of plays, forms, and contexts of theatre production, Representing the Rural celebrates the lively engagement with rurality on English stages since 2000, constituting the first full study of theatrical representations of rural life. Interdisciplinary in its approach, this book draws on political philosophy and cultural geography in its definitions of rurality and Englishness, and works with key theoretical concepts such as nostalgia and ethnonationalism. Covering a range of perspectives from the country garden in Mike Bartlett’s Albion to agricultural labour in Nell Leyshon’s The Farm, the enclosure acts in D.C. Moore’s Common to Black rural history in Testament’s Black Men Walking, the book shows how theatre and performance can open up different ways of reading rural geographies, histories, and lives. While Representing the Rural is aimed at students and researchers of theatre and performance, its interdisciplinary scope means that it has wider appeal to other disciplines in the arts and humanities, including geography, politics, and history.