Literary Englands: Versions of 'Englishness’ in Modern Writing

In our time ‘Englishness’ has become a theme for speculation rather than dogma: twentieth-century writers have found it an elusive and ambiguous concept, a cue for nostalgia or for a sense of exile and loss. Literary Englands meditates on the contemporary meanings of ‘Englishness’ and explores some of the ways in which a sense of nationality has informed and shaped the work of a range of writers including Edward Thomas, Forster and Lawrence, Leavis and George Sturt, Orwell and Evelyn Waugh, Betjeman, Larkin and Geoffrey Hill. Through close engagement with the language and thought of these writers David Gervais shows the extent to which they have been influenced by the consciousness of working within a long-established, complex and sophisticated literary tradition. In the process he elucidates a nostalgia which lies at the heart of our culture.

• Challenges existing views of the nature of ‘Englishness’ • Explores and elucidates a nostalgia which lies at the heart of contemporary English culture • Draws links across a wide range of seemingly disparate twentieth-century writers