The Politics of Englishness

The politics of Englishness provides a digest of the debates about England and Englishness and a unique perspective on those debates. Not only does the book provide readers with ready access to and interpretation of the significant literature on the English Question, it also enables them to make sense of the political, historical and cultural factors which constitute that question. The book addresses the condition of England in three interrelated parts. The first looks at traditional narratives of the English polity and reads them as variations of a legend of political Englishness, of England as the exemplary exception, exceptional in its constitutional tradition and exemplary in its political stability. The second considers how the decay of that legend has encouraged anxieties about English political identity and about how English identity can be recognised within the new complexity of British governance. The third revisits these narratives and anxieties, examining them in terms of actual and metaphorical 'locations' of Englishness: the regional, the European and the British.

ISBN 071906872X   Pages 264 ISBN13 9780719068720 (What's this?)   Volumes 1 Publisher Manchester University Press   Weight (grammes) 540 Imprint Manchester University Press   Published in Manchester Format Hardback   Height (mm) 234 Publication date 01 Apr 2007   Width (mm) 156 Library of Congress DA   Spine width (mm) 25 DEWEY 306.0942   Academic level Undergraduate DEWEY edition DC22

		Preface and acknowledgements
1		Put out more flags		1
Pt. I		Legends of Englishness
2		An absorptive patria		19
3		The English idiom		42
4		Dead centre of inertia		62
Pt. II		Anxieties of Englishness
5		English before they were British		83
6		England.co.uk		101
7		Slow alchemy of centuries		121
Pt. III		Locations of Englishness
8		Region: resources of identity		143
9		Europe: a necessary context		163
10		England: a British relationship		183
11		Put out even more flags		203
		References		215
		Index		249

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