Considers how notions of Britishness were constructed and promoted through architecture, landscape, painting, sculpture and literature. Maps important moments in the self-conscious evolution of the idea of ‘nation’ against a broad cultural historical framework. An important addition to the field of postcolonial studies as it looks at how British identity creation affected those living in England – most study in this area has thus far focused on the effect of such identity creation upon the colonial subject. Broad appeal due to wide subject matter covered. Examines just how ‘constructed’ a national identity is – past and present.
This book examines the conflicts, dilemmas and contradictions that marked Englishness as the nation changed from an imperial power to a postcolonial state. The chapters deal with travel writing, popular song, music hall and variety theatre, dances, elocution lessons, cricket and football, and national festivals, as well as literature and film. 'High' and 'popular' cultures are brought together in dialogue, and the diversity as well as the problematic nature of English identity is emphasised. The case studies are linked by their interests in different kinds of performances of being English, and by a particular focus upon the voice and the body as key sites for the struggles of modern England. The book is a lively contribution to current interdisciplinary debates about Englishness, national cultures and postcolonial identities. It is relevant to undergraduate students of literature, drama, film, politics and sociology, and will also appeal to a general readership.
By outlining Protestantism and Englishness in early-modern literature to the present-day, this study reveals how other religious identities can be alienated in British society.
This companion is a collection of newly-commissioned essays written by leading scholars in the field, providing a comprehensive introduction to British art history. A generously-illustrated collection of newly-commissioned essays which provides a comprehensive introduction to the history of British art Combines original research with a survey of existing scholarship and the state of the field Touches on the whole of the history of British art, from 800-2000, with increasing attention paid to the periods after 1500 Provides the first comprehensive introduction to British art of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries, one of the most lively and innovative areas of art-historical study Presents in depth the major preoccupations that have emerged from recent scholarship, including aesthetics, gender, British art’s relationship to Modernity, nationhood and nationality, and the institutions of the British art world
This book explores the tensions underlying British imperialism in Cyprus. Much has been written about the British Empire’s construction outside Europe, yet there is little on the same themes in Britain’s tiny empire in ‘Europe’. This study follows Cyprus’ progress from a perceived imperial asset to an expendable backwater by explaining how the Union Jack came to fly over the island and why after thirty-five years the British wanted it lowered. Cyprus’ importance was always more imagined than real and was enmeshed within widely held cultural signifiers and myths. British Imperialism in Cyprus fills a gap in the existing literature on the early British period in Cyprus and challenges the received and monolithic view that British imperial policy was based primarily or exclusively on strategic-military considerations. The combination of archival research, cultural analysis and visual narrative that makes for an enjoyable read for academics and students of Imperial, British and European history.
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. The first comprehensive discussion of the major Caribbean thinkers who came to Britain. Written in an accessible, lively style, with a range of wonderful and distinguished authors. Key book for thinking about the future of multicultural Britain; study thus far has concentrated on Caribbean literature and how authors ‘write back’ to Britain – this book is the first to consider how they ‘think back’ to Britain. A book of the moment - nothing comparable on the Carribean influence on Britain.. Discusses the influence, amongst others, of C. L. R. James, Una Marson, George Lamming, Jean Rhys, Claude McKay and V. S. Naipaul.
Effeminate Years: Literature, Politics, and Aesthetics in Mid-Eighteenth-Century Britain investigates the gendered, eroticized, and xenophobic ways in which the controversies in the 1760s surrounding the political figure John Wilkes (1725-97) legitimated some men as political subjects, while forcefully excluding others on the basis of their perceived effeminacy or foreignness. However, this book is not a literary analysis of the Wilkes affair in the 1760s, nor is it a linear account of Wilkes’s political career. Instead, Effeminate Years examines the cultural crisis of effeminacy that made Wilkes’s politicking so appealing. The central theoretical problem that this study addresses is the argument about what is and is not political: where does individual autonomy begin and end? Addressing this question, Kavanagh traces the shaping influence of the discourse of effeminacy in the literature that was generated by Wilkes’s legal and sexual scandals, while, at the same time, he also reads Wilkes’s spectacular drumming up of support as a timely exploitation of the broader cultural crisis of effeminacy during the mid century in Britain. The book begins with the scandals and agitations surrounding Wilkes, and ends with readings of Edmund Burke’s (1729-1797) earliest political writings, which envisage political community—a vision, that Kavanagh argues, is influenced by Wilkes and the effeminate years of the 1760s. Throughout, Kavanagh shows how interlocutors in the political and cultural debates of the mid-eighteenth-century period in Britain, such as Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) and Arthur Murphy (1727-1805), attempt to resolve the problem of effeminate excess. In part, the resolution for Wilkes and Charles Churchill (1731-1764) was to shunt effeminacy onto the sexually non-normative. On the other hand, Burke, in his aesthetic theorization of the beautiful privileges the socially constitutive affects of feeling effeminate. Through an analysis of poetry, fiction, social and economic pamphlets, aesthetic treatises, journalism and correspondences, placed within the latest queer historiography, Kavanagh demonstrates that the mid-century effeminacy crisis served to re-conceive male heterosexuality as the very mark of political legitimacy. Overall, Effeminate Years explores the development of modern ideas of masculinity and the political subject, which are still the basis of debate and argument in our own time.
"Political economy is defined in this volume as collective state or corporate support for art and architecture in the public sphere intended to be accessible to the widest possible public, raising questions about the relationship of the state to cultural production and consumption. This collection of essays explores the political economy of art from the perspective of the artist or from analysis of art's production and consumption, emphasizing the art side of the relationship between art and state. This volume explores art as public good, a central issue in political economy. Essays examine specific cultural spaces as points of struggle between economic and cultural processes. Essays focus on three areas of conflict: theories of political economy put into practices of state cultural production, sculptural and architectural monuments commissioned by state and corporate entities, and conflicts and critiques of state investments in culture by artists and the public."--amazon.com edit. desc.
A heavily illustrated history of two centuries of male beauty in British culture. Spanning the decades from the rise of photography to the age of the selfie, this book traces the complex visual and consumer cultures that shaped masculine beauty in Britain, examining the realms of advertising, health, pornography, psychology, sport, and celebrity culture. Paul R. Deslandes chronicles the shifting standards of male beauty in British culture—from the rising cult of the athlete to changing views on hairlessness—while connecting discussions of youth, fitness, and beauty to growing concerns about race, empire, and degeneracy. From earlier beauty show contestants and youth-obsessed artists, the book moves through the decades into considerations of disfigured soldiers, physique models, body-conscious gay men, and celebrities such as David Beckham and David Gandy who populate the worlds of television and social media. Deslandes calls on historians to take beauty and gendered aesthetics seriously while recasting how we think about the place of physical appearance in historical study, the intersection of different forms of high and popular culture, and what has been at stake for men in “looking good.”
