Englishness and National Culture

Englishness and National Culture
by Antony Easthorpe
Paperback: 256 pages
Published: December 22, 1998
ISBN-10: 0415196884
ISBN-13: 978-0415196888

In this highly engaging book, Antony Easthope examines 'Englishness' as a form and a series of shared discourses. Discussing the subject of 'nation' - a growing area in literary and cultural studies - Easthope offers polemical arguments written in a lively and accessible style. Englishness and National Culture asserts a profound and unacknowledged continuity between the seventeenth century and today. It argues that contemporary journalists, historians, novelists, poets and comedians continue to speak through the voice of a long-standing empiricist tradition.

Easthope breathes new life into what easily could have become another walk-through of the culture wars.. This book is a stimulating and valuable contribution to investigations of Englishness. Easthope's discursive analyses broaden the field beyond only examining cultural texts explicitly forged in the colonial crucible. Similarly, by beginning to identify specific markers of Englishness (empiricism, classic irony, denigration of the body), Easthope also moves past the thematicization of an identity founded throughout difference by instead offering the possibility that this dialectic might be located in the very rhetoric and form of the discourse itself. Furthermore, by looking at contemporary English expressions of nationness, this book opens up new ground for postcolonial criticism through the examination of post-imperial British texts whose very features betray the continuing legacy of Empire.