Englishness Revisited – Contemporary Literary Representations of English National and Cultural Identity

The book discusses selected works of literature written in Great Britain in the final decades of the twentieth century in the context of contemporary debates on English national and cultural identity. Its main goal is to investigate how writers discussed in the book, Peter Ackroyd, Julian Barnes, and Adam Thorpe, address the issue of Englishness and to examine how they revisit its traditional formulations. Literary works by Ackroyd, Barnes, and Thorpe are discussed in the context of philosophy of history, spatial definitions of Englishness founded upon the myth of Green England, the tradition of the pastoral novel, and the discourse of the picturesque. Literary approaches to these issues are confronted with prevailing discourses of Englishness that in the late twentieth century were being both reinforced and questioned from different positions, as well as addressed by the authors in questions in their novels and polemical texts.