Some of the most incisive writers on the subject rethink the relationship between Britain, England and English literary culture. It is premised on the importance of devolution, the uncertainty of the British union, the place of English Literature within the union, and the need for England to become a self-determining literary nation.
1819 was the annus mirabilis for many British Romantic writers, and the annus terribilis for demonstrators protesting the state of parliamentary representation. In 1819 Keats wrote what many consider his greatest poetry. This was the year of Shelley's Prometheus Unbound, The Cenci, and Ode to the West Wind. Wordsworth published his most widely reviewed work, Peter Bell, and the craze for Walter Scott's historical novels reached its zenith. Many of these writings explicitly engaged with the politics of representation in 1819, especially the great movement for reform that was fueled by threats of mass emigration to America and came to a head that August with an unprovoked attack on unarmed men, women, and children in St. Peter's Field, Manchester, a massacre that journalists dubbed "Peterloo." But the year of Peterloo in British history is notable for more than just the volume, value, and topicality of its literature. Much of the writing from 1819, argues James Chandler, was acutely aware not only of its place in history, but also of its place as history - a realization of a literary "spirit of the age" that resonates strongly with the current "return to history" in literary studies. Chandler explores the ties between Romantic and contemporary historicism, such as the shared tendency to seize a single dated event as both important on its own and as a "case" testing general principles. To animate these issues, Chandler offers a series of cases of his own built around key texts from 1819.
In Georgian England, independence was associated with manly virtue and physical vigour. Fundamentally, the political world was thought to consist of "independent men" exercising their consciences and standing up for the general good. As such, Georgians thought about political action and masculine virtue very differently to the ways in which we do today.
This volume examines private libraries and book ownership in seventeenth-century England, with particular focus on how libraries developed over this period and the social impact that they had.
A history of the UK’s regional inequalities, and why they matter Differences between England’s North and South continue to shape national politics, from attitudes to Brexit and the electoral collapse of Labour’s ‘Red Wall’ to Whitehall’s experimentation with regional pandemic lockdowns. Why is this fault line such a persistent feature of the English landscape? The Northern Question is a history of England seen in the unfamiliar light of a northern perspective. While London is the capital and the centre for trade and finance, the proclaimed leader of the nation, northern England has always seemed like a different country. In the nineteenth century its industrializing society appeared set to bring a political revolution down upon Westminster and the City. Tom Hazeldine recounts how subsequent governments put finance before manufacturing, London ahead of the regions, and austerity before reconstruction.
At a time of crisis and constitutional turmoil, literature itself acquired new functions and played a dynamic part in the fragmentation of religious and political authority.
Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1,7, University of Potsdam (Anglistik/Amerikanistik), course: Victorian Novels, language: English, abstract: The aim of this paper is to compare three of the most influential Utopian novels of the Victorian era in Great Britain: William Morris ́ News from Nowhere, Samuel Butler ́s Erewhon and Edward Bulwer-Lytton ́s The Coming Race. ... I will concentrate on a specific aspect which struck me as most interesting. The question I want to pose is in how far the works are still hopeful and positive and how far they are already disillusioned and negative. Do they consider the idea of a utopian and perfect society to be desirable and possible? I found that Morris’ News from Nowhere is still a classic Utopia as it depicts a hopeful prospect of an ideal state of society, but it also introduces a new notion. A utopian society is not something out of human reach, but can be realised entirely. Morris’ basis was Marx’ theory and he really believed in the possibility of a truly communist and happy nation. Butler’s work Erewhon should be rather called a satire, as it is mostly a criticism of Victorian society. But still, it uses the frame of a Utopian fiction and therefor also comments on it. From Erewhon can be concluded that mankind is not capable of true improvement and that a perfect system is intolerant and oppressive. Lytton’s work The Coming Race is a mixture of criticism, offering answers and for the most part a discussion of the perfectibility of men and the desirability of perfection, coming to the conclusion that perfection and the desire for it is rather a threat to mankind.
This book analyses cricket’s place in Anglophone Caribbean literature. It examines works by canonical authors – Brathwaite, Lamming, Lovelace, Naipaul, Phillips and Selvon – and by understudied writers – including Agard, Fergus, John, Keens-Douglas, Khan and Markham. It tackles short stories, novels, poetry, drama and film from the Caribbean and its diaspora. Its literary readings are couched in the history of Caribbean cricket and studies by Hilary Beckles and Gordon Rohlehr. C.L.R James’ foundational Beyond a Boundary provides its theoretical grounding. Literary depictions of iconic West Indies players – including Constantine, Headley, Worrell, Walcott, Sobers, Richards, and Lara – feature throughout. The discussion focuses on masculinity, heroism, father-son dynamics, physical performativity and aesthetic style. Attention is also paid to mother-daughter relations and female engagement with cricket, with examples from Anim-Addo, Breeze, Wynter and others. Cricket holds a prominent place in the history, culture, politics and popular imaginary of the Caribbean. This book demonstrates that it also holds a significant and complicated place in Anglophone Caribbean literature.
A study of place, identity, music, politics and regionalism which calls for a radical restructuring of the British Isles. In the early twenty-first century, "Englishness" suddenly became a hot topic. A rash of art exhibitions, pop albums and coffee table books arrived on the scene, all desperate to recover England’s lost national soul. But when we sweep away the patriotic stereotypes, we begin to see that England is a country that does not — and perhaps should not — exist in any essential sense. In this provocative text combining polemic and memoir, Alex Niven argues that the map of the British Isles should be torn apart completely as we look towards a time of radical political reform. Rejecting outdated nationalisms, Niven argues for a renovated model of culture and governance for the islands — a fluid, dynamic version of regionalism preparing the way for a new "dream archipelago".