Englishness Identified

Englishness Identified PDF Author: Paul Langford
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0199246408
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 402

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Book Description
In the seventeenth century the English were often depicted as a nation of barbarians, fanatics, and king-killers. Two hundred years later they were more likely to be seen as the triumphant possessors of a unique political stability, vigorous industrial revolution, and a world-wide empire.These may have been British achievements; but the virtues which brought about this transformation tended to be perceived as specifically English. Ideas of what constituted Englishness changed from a stock notion of waywardness and unpredictability to one of discipline and dedication. The evolutionof the so-called national character - today once more the subject of scrutiny and debate - is traced through the impressions and analyses of foreign observers, and related to English ambitions and anxieties during a period of intense change.

Englishness Identified

Englishness Identified PDF Author: Paul Langford
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0199246408
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 402

Get Book

Book Description
In the seventeenth century the English were often depicted as a nation of barbarians, fanatics, and king-killers. Two hundred years later they were more likely to be seen as the triumphant possessors of a unique political stability, vigorous industrial revolution, and a world-wide empire.These may have been British achievements; but the virtues which brought about this transformation tended to be perceived as specifically English. Ideas of what constituted Englishness changed from a stock notion of waywardness and unpredictability to one of discipline and dedication. The evolutionof the so-called national character - today once more the subject of scrutiny and debate - is traced through the impressions and analyses of foreign observers, and related to English ambitions and anxieties during a period of intense change.

Englishness Identified

Englishness Identified PDF Author: Paul Langford
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 019158858X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 402

Get Book

Book Description
In the seventeenth century the English were often depicted as a nation of barbarians, fanatics, and king-killers. Two hundred years later they were more likely to be seen as the triumphant possessors of a unique political stability, vigorous industrial revolution, and a world-wide empire. These may have been British achievements; but the virtues which brought about this transformation tended to be perceived as specifically English. Ideas of what constituted Englishness changed from a stock notion of waywardness and unpredictability to one of discipline and dedication. The evolution of the so-called national character - today once more the subject of scrutiny and debate - is traced through the impressions and analyses of foreign observers, and related to English ambitions and anxieties during a period of intense change.

The Making of English National Identity

The Making of English National Identity PDF Author: Krishan Kumar
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521777360
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 390

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Book Description
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.

Englishness

Englishness PDF Author: Ailsa Henderson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192643789
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
Until the Brexit referendum, there was widespread doubt as to whether English nationalism existed at all, at least beyond a small fringe. Since then, it has come to be regarded an obvious explanation for the vote to Leave the European Union. Subsequent opinion polls have raised doubts about the extent of continuing English commitment to the Union of the United Kingdom itself. Yet even as Englishness is apparently reshaping Britain's place in world and perhaps, ultimately, the state itself, it remains poorly understood. In this book Ailsa Henderson and Richard Wyn Jones draw on data from the Future of England Survey, a specially commissioned public attitudes survey programme exploring the political implications of English identity, to make new and original arguments about the nature of English nationalism. They demonstrate that English nationalism is emphatically not a rejection of Britain and Britishness. Rather, English nationalism combines a sense of grievance about England's place within the United Kingdom with a fierce commitment to a particular vision of Britain's past, present, and future. Understanding its Janus-faced nature - both England and Britain - is key not only to understanding English nationalism, but also to understanding the ways in which it is transforming British politics.

Smell in Eighteenth-century England

Smell in Eighteenth-century England PDF Author: William Tullett
Publisher: Past and Present Book
ISBN: 0198844131
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
In England from the 1670s to the 1820s a transformation took place in how smell and the senses were viewed. The role of smell in developing medical and scientific knowledge came under intense scrutiny, and the equation of smell with disease was actively questioned. Yet a new interest in smell's emotive and idiosyncratic dimensions offered odour a new power in the sociable spaces of eighteenth-century England. Using a wide range of sources from diaries, letters, and sanitary records to satirical prints, consumer objects, and magazines, William Tullett traces how individuals and communities perceived the smells around them, from paint and perfume to onions and farts. In doing so, the study challenges a popular, influential, and often cited narrative. Smell in Eighteenth-Century England is not a tale of the medicalization and deodorization of English olfactory culture. Instead, Tullett demonstrates that it was a new recognition of smell's asocial-sociability, and its capacity to create atmospheres of uncomfortable intimacy, that transformed the relationship between the senses and society.

Christopher Smart's English Lyrics

Christopher Smart's English Lyrics PDF Author: Rosalind Powell
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317166396
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
In the first full-length study of Christopher Smart’s translations and the place and function of translation in Smart’s poetry, Rosalind Powell proposes a new approach to understanding the relationship between Smart’s poetics and his practice. Drawing on translation theory from the early modern period to the present day, this book addresses Smart's translations of Horace, Phaedrus and the Psalms alongside the better-known religious works such as Jubilate Agno and A Song to David. Five recurrent threads run throughout Powell’s study: the effect of translation on the identity of a narrative voice in a rewritten text; the techniques that are used to present translated texts to a new literary, cultural and linguistic readership; performance and reading contexts; the translation of great works as an attempt to achieve literary permanence; and, finally, the authorial influence of Smart himself in terms of the overt religiosity and nationalism that he champions in his writing. In exploring Smart’s major translation projects and revisiting his original poems, Powell offers insights into classical reception and translation theory; attitudes towards censorship; expressions of nationalism in the period; developments in liturgy and hymnody; and the composition of children’s books and school texts in the early modern era. Her detailed analysis of Smart’s translating poetics places them within a new, contemporary context and locality to uncover the poet's works as a coherent project of Englishing.

Samuel Johnson and the Making of Modern England

Samuel Johnson and the Making of Modern England PDF Author: Nicholas Hudson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 0521831253
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
Samuel Johnson, one of the most renowned authors of the eighteenth century, became virtually a symbol of English national identity in the century following his death in 1784. In Samuel Johnson and the Making of Modern England Nicholas Hudson argues that Johnson not only came to personify English cultural identity but did much to shape it. Hudson examines his contribution to the creation of the modern English identity, approaching Johnson's writing and conversation from scarcely explored directions of cultural criticism - class politics, feminism, party politics, the public sphere, nationalism, and imperialism. Hudson charts the career of an author who rose from obscurity to fame during precisely the period that England became the dominant ideological force in the Western world. In exploring the relations between Johnson's career and the development of England's modern national identity, Hudson develops new and provocative arguments concerning both Johnson's literary achievement and the nature of English Nationhood.

The British Soldier in the Peninsular War

The British Soldier in the Peninsular War PDF Author: G. Daly
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137323833
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 302

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Book Description
Combining military and cultural history, the book explores British soldiers' travels and cross-cultural encounters in Spain and Portugal, 1808-1814. It is the story of how soldiers interacted with the local environment and culture, of their attitudes and behaviour towards the inhabitants, and how they wrote about all this in letters and memoirs.

John Henry Newman and the English Sensibility

John Henry Newman and the English Sensibility PDF Author: Jacob Phillips
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0567689026
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 147

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Book Description
Asides about John Henry Newman being either particularly English or particularly un-English are common. John Henry Newman and the English Sensibility scrutinises Newman's theological writings to establish how his theology can be considered distinctively English or un-English at the different stages of its development. In his Tractarian period, Newman's theology is shown to be profoundly characterised by common 19th-century tropes of a perceived English sensibility, namely an instinct for compromise, an affection for reserve and a markedly empirical orientation to life. In the period following Newman's conversion to Catholicism in 1845, however, his theology turns against the Englishness of his earlier years as he critiques of the many theological dangers of a self-confident cultural sensibility. In his mature writings, nonetheless, Newman re-incorporates certain elements of his earlier Englishness with a Catholic grounding, yet also maintains an antipathy to certain targets of his post-conversion polemics. Phillips finds that the English instinct for compromise is not incorporated into Newman's mature theology, which remains unabashedly one-sided in its understanding of God and the Catholic Church, taking precedence over elements of a cultural sensibility pertaining ultimately to the sphere of the natural. The affection for reserve, however, is shown to be capable of gracious elevation when reconfigured on a Catholic grounding. Most importantly, the profoundly empirical orientation to life which was considered typical of Englishness in Newman's day emerges as something exhibiting what Newman might consider a 'antecedent affinity' to Catholic theology. This book thus concludes by offering a view of the English Catholic sensibility as characterised by a mindset of careful reserve toward knowledge and words about God, arising from a marked concern for the living, embodied present as the site of God's transformative action in the twists and turns of human life.

Renaissance Mad Voyages

Renaissance Mad Voyages PDF Author: Anthony Parr
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317066456
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 292

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Book Description
A vogue for travel ’stunts’ flourished in England between 1590 and the 1620s: playful imitations or burlesques of maritime enterprise and overland travel that collectively appear to be a response to particular innovations and developments in English culture. This study is the first full length scholarly work to focus on the curious phenomenon of ’madde voiages’, as the writer William Rowley called them. Anthony Parr shows that the mad voyage (as Rowley and others conceived it) had surprisingly deep and diverse roots in traditional travel practices, in courtly play and mercantile custom, and in literary culture. Looking in detail at several of the best-documented exploits, Parr situates them in the ferment of such ventures during the period in question; but also reaches back to explore their classical and mediaeval antecedents, and considers their role in creating a template for eccentric English adventure in later centuries. Renaissance Mad Voyages brings together literary and historical enquiry in order to address the implications of an interesting and neglected cultural trend. Parr's investigation of the rash of travel exploits in the period leads to extensive research on the origins of the wager on travel and its role in the expansion of English tourism and trading activity.