European Journal of English Studies | ^ Routledoe2004, Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 145-158 l \ Taylor&Frane OroupDOI: 10.1080/1382557042000294693

The Importance of Being English: European Perspectiveson Englishness

Vera NlinningUniversitat Heidelberg

Englishness has been a popular topic for a long time, but it was never ascontroversially contested as it is now. When not only the Prime Minister butalso writers such as Julian Barnes and pop singers like Billy Bragg feel thatthey have to get involved in the debates, then it comes as no surprise thatscholars and journalists have adopted Englishness as one of their favouritetopics, too. Long gone are declarations on the 'specific characteristics' ofthe English and the belief in the superiority of the race, and yet English-ness has remained a hot issue in our own days. The terms of the debate,however, have shifted considerably. First, the belief in Englishness as anessence, as 'a sort of collective "one true self"' that is 'naturally' sharedby everyone belonging to that culture, has been discarded and substitutedby a whole range of new concepts, approaches and models of explanation.There is a widespread consensus now that Englishness is a construct, andthat 'no description of Britain is ideologically innocent, a mere representa-tion of what is there, simply, positively, naturally'.^ Secondly, it is not pos-sible any more to gloss over cultural differences and assume that there isan easily definable group of people whose characteristics can be subsumedunder the umbrella term 'Englishness'. Instead, the question of who doesand who does not belong to that group is hotly contested. Furthermore,the traditional, often unthinking mix-up of Englishness and Britishness

Correspondence: Vera Niinning, Anglistisches Seminar, Universitat Heidelberg, Ketten-gasse 12, 69117 Heidelberg (Germany), phone: +49/(0)6221/542810,e-mail: Vera.Nuenning@urz.uni-heidelberg.de.

' Stuart Hall, 'Cultural Identity and Diaspora', in Identity: Community, Culture, Differ-ence, ed. Jonathan Rutherford (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990), p. 223. Halldraws attention to the fact that this conception of cultural identity resonates in theattempts of the black diaspora to discover 'the essence' of their unique experience.

^ Manfred Pfister, 'Editorial', in The Discovery of Britain {Journal for the Study of Brit-ish Cultures, 4,1), ed. Jurgen Kramer (Tubingen: Gunter Narr, 1997), 5-9, p. 6.

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has lost influence. In its place Englishness is now more and more definedin relation to 'Welshness' and 'Scottishness', a frame of reference whichhas given the debates a new direction and has tapped entirely differentconvictions and emotions. Just as controversial is the discussion of therelations between 'Englishness' and the cultural identities of peoples of theformer colonies. Indeed, the very process of devolution, as well as the openquestion of the long-term consequences and the success of that process onthe one hand, and the challenges that the integration of an ever growingnumber of immigrants and their descendants pose on the other hand, haveserved to fuel the discussion of Englishness as a concept with far reachingcultural implications and new political dimensions.

Just how topical Englishness is can be illustrated by a brief glance atcontemporary fiction. Although - or perhaps partly because - many novelspublished by English authors are set in foreign countries, the explorationof the features that can be attributed to the English is a common charac-teristic of novels or collections of short stories like Julian Barnes's CrossChannel (1996) or Nicholas Shakespeare's The High Flyer (1993). Theseand other recent works display, as Malcolm Bradbury put it, 'deliberate"Englishness'".-' This often leads to a host of intertextual references, whichturn novels like Peter Ackroyd's English Music (1992), Andrew Sinclair's'Albion triptych' - consisting of his novels Gog (1967), Magog (1972),and King Ludd (1988) - as well as Adam Thorpe's Ulverton (1992) intoecho-chambers of England's cultural history. In the 'Acknowledgements'to English Music Peter Ackroyd explicitly draws the reader's attention tothis feature: 'The scholarly reader will soon realize that I have appropri-ated passages from Thomas Browne, Thomas Malory, William Hogarth,Thomas Morley, Lewis Carroll, Samuel Johnson, Daniel Defoe and manyother English writers'."* These intertextual references serve to fulfil quitedifferent functions, though. Whereas they sometimes amount to little morethan a nostalgic evocation of the past, A.N. Wilson's conventional novelGentlemen in England (1985) being a case in point, others deconstructattractive and longstanding myths, or even the notion that there are char-acteristic features shared by the 'Anglo-Saxon race'.

Malcolm Bradbury, The Modern British Novel (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), p.361.Peter Ackroyd, English Music (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992), no page number.The quotation ends with the following words: 'the alert reader will understand why Ihave done so'. In an interview, Ackroyd later admitted that this was quite an obviousthing to say and that it was a mistake to point this out. Critics, however, keep quotingthis sentence because it expresses the concerns of many contemporary novels. See 'DoYou Consider Yourself a Postmodern Author?', eds. Rudolf Freiburg and Jan Schnitker(Munster: LIT, 1999), 9-19, p. 15.

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A particularly interesting example of the deconstruction and recon-struction of Englishness can be witnessed in Julian Barnes's recent novel,England, England (1998). In this novel, the discussion of Englishness isintricately connected with 'the philosophical distinction between the realand the replica or, in this case, its representation in memory or history'^and 'the elusive nature of memory, which is all tied up with confusionsabout individual and national identity'.^ In the interesting middle sectionof the book, a steering committee led by Sir Jack Pitman tries to makea fortune by building an essence-of-England theme park on the Isle ofWight. Though the detailed description of the realization and success ofthis scheme abounds with satire and wit, the whole plan appears less andless absurd as the story progresses. Having taken a poll to determine whichthings potential visitors primarily associate with England, the Pitman com-pany sets about exploiting the only thing England has that is still thoughtto be valuable, and therefore rebuilds all that England was renowned for,celebrating English culture of yesteryear on the Isle of Wight, which isrenamed 'England, England'. Sir Jack thus tries to capitalize on the late-twentieth-century British obsession with national heritage by buildingsomething that is both similar and yet on an altogether more gigantic scale:an 'original reproduction' (oxymoron intended) of England's genuine cul-tural heritage. All the historic sites - including the major battlegrounds.Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, Anne Hathaway's cottage, and the grave ofPrincess Diana - are situated within easy visiting distance, with Harrodsbeing conveniently placed within the Tower of London. In 'England, Eng-land' tourists can meet national icons like the King and Queen of England,chat with historical celebrities like Samuel Johnson or Nell Gwyn, sharepastoral idylls with shepherds, and even encounter myths, Robin Hood'sBand of Merry Men being especially popular with the visitors. This arti-ficially created miniature version of England that is tailored to tourists'tastes is so successful that it gradually begins to replace Old England,which, bereft of tourists, gradually falls into decay.

The difficulties the Pitman company encounters in its attempts to comeup with 'authentic' or true, let alone positive versions of English charac-ter traits, myths or icons illustrate that Englishness is the consequence ofan arbitrary process of construction which has produced a heterogeneousmixture of invented traditions. By foregrounding the processes accord-ing to which 'Englishness' is manufactured, Barnes's novel shows that

5 Andro Linklater, 'A Very English Whimsy', Bookshelf 27 August 1998, <http://www.theherald.co.uk/bookshelf/archive/27-8-1998-21 -50-50.html>.

* OngSor Fern, 77^e5fra(7i^//ne5//^r(^racrive 24 October 1998, <http://web3.asial.com.sg/archive/st/4books/bl02406.html>.

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the tools forging the selection and enhancement of features which areultimately presented as 'English' are largely Anglo-Saxon, middle-class,and male. The English tradition that emerges from this process comesdangerously close to being chauvinist, xenophobic, and racist.^ In spiteof the constructed nature of the concept, therefore, nostalgic and seem-ingly harmless constructs of Englishness may lead to serious consequence,when, for instance, they are used to legitimate racist behaviour. In thenovel the power of such constructs is illustrated by the fact that actors whoimpersonate popular icons and myths identify with their roles to such anextent that they do not obey company rules any more. The 'Merry Men'of Robin Hood, for instance, hunt for their own food in the adjoining parkand diminish the shepherds' flock, instead of eating the politically correctvegetarian meals.

By criticising the negative characteristics that are often idealised innostalgic conceptions of Englishness, by showing the separatist, racist,and nationalist tendencies involved in parochial constructions of English-ness, and by illustrating the importance of 'invented traditions', Barnes'snovel raises many of the concerns that manifest themselves in currentfictional and scholarly explorations of Englishness. That the Pitman com-mittee excludes everything Irish, Welsh, and Scottish, for instance, notonly stresses the separatist tendencies inherent in Englishness but alsoits fundamental difference to Britishness. The relation between these twoconcepts and their respective evaluation are far from clear; the Welsh andthe Scottish are, understandably, not very fond of allegedly typical Englishtraits.* However, in spite of the fact that, at least in Scotland and Wales,Englishness is historically connected to and associated with dominanceand exploitation, the English are usually held to be neither domineeringnor exploitative. Instead, when pitted against Britishness, Englishness istypically associated with justice and freedom, and proves to be the morepopular and less harmful of the two concepts. One does not have to searchlong in order to come up with possible reasons for this. After all. GreatBritain is a political construct, created by the Act of Union, which, from1707 onward, joined the crowns of England and Scotland, and two nationswhich were traditionally less than friendly towards each other. From thebeginning, English traits proved to be dominant, for the new national iden-

See Vera Niinning, 'The Invention of Cultural Traditions: The Construction and Decon-struction of Englishness and Authenticity in Julian Barnes' England, England', Anglia119,1 (2001) pp. 58-76.A more detailed view of the reconsideration of Englishness in the light of Welsh andScottish nationalism is given in the introduction of the essay by Raphael Ingelbien inthe present volume.

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tity that was forged after 1707 was largely made up of English characteris-tics which were now flaunted as common features of the Island race, whileattributes held to be typical of the Scots were conveniently marginalized.^It was only later that 'Britishness' acquired characteristics distinct fromEnglishness. This change can be related to the difficulties the English hadin coming to terms with their rapidly expanding empire in the nineteenthcentury. Up to the 1870s, Englishmen tended to associate the notion ofempire with a state having subjected dominions, and to dislike associationsthat smacked of despotism. In English minds, such negative connotationscould readily be applied to the new German empire, but not to England. Itwas only in the late nineteenth century that the British managed to comeup with a new, favourable self-image that included the idea of a BritishEmpire. Faced with the 'colonial other', the British began to develop a newself-image as a benign governing 'master-race', a construction that helpedto gloss over the differences within the British population; in this way theconcept of Britishness came to be more important than the traditional ver-sions of 'Englishness' and 'Scottishness'.'°

Today, Britishness and Englishness are still competing notions, withEnglishness being much more popular among contemporary authors andscholars. Britishness, by contrast, seems to be mainly valued by politicians,who have to represent and address all the inhabitants of Great Britain andcannot appeal to only one part of their potential electorate. The importanceof a favourable self-image of Britishness was emphasized, for instance,during the Falkland War, when a national consensus once again became amajor concern. Margaret Thatcher was the first to both exploit and try toshape alleged national characteristics in the speech she gave after the bat-tle of the South Atlantic, a speech in which she said that 'the lesson of theFalklands is that Britain has not changed'. The lesson was, she proclaimed,that 'this nation still has those sterling qualities which shine through ourhistory. This generation can match their fathers and grandfathers in abil-ity, in courage, and in resolution. We have not changed [...] we Britishare as we have always been - competent, courageous and resolute'." Her

' Colin Kidd, Subverting Scotland's Past: Scottish Whig Historians and the Creationof an Anglo-British Identity, 1689- c.1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1993).

'" See, for instance, my article, 'Where the Discourses of Nationalism and Religion Meet:The Forging of an Empire of the Mind in Nineteenth-Century Debates about the BritishEmpire', in Religious Thinking and National Identity/ Religioses Denken und nationaleIdentitat, ed. Hans-Dieter Metzger (Berlin: Philo, 2000), pp. 149-76.

' ' Margaret Thatcher, Speech 3 July 1982, quoted in: Susan Condor, '"Having History":A Social Psychological Exploration of Anglo-British Autostereotypes', in BeyondPug's Tour: National and Ethnic Stereotyping in Theory and Literary Practice, ed.Cedric C. Barfoot (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1997), 213-53, p. 233.

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successor John Major promoted a different view, famously associatingBritishness with 'old maids bicycling to the village church'. A much moresystematic attempt to exploit alleged British characteristics started withthe New Labour government of Tony Blair, who set out to remodel GreatBritain as an innovative, exemplary nation of the third millennium.'^

Although the speeches of these and other politicians illustrate the undi-minished importance of national identity today, they should not be takenas indicative of a new popularity of an essentialist notion of Britishness.They rather reflect the need to abandon the parochial nature of traditionalEngiishness and to forge a new national self-image that every inhabitantof Great Britain can identify with. This necessity is most glaringly visiblewhen one looks at the immigrants from the British Empire, i.e. at thoseminorities in British society whose roots are in India, South Africa, theCaribbean, or other former colonies and dependencies. To these citizens,whose families have in many cases been living in cities of the UK formore than a generation and who have sometimes not even visited the placeof their origin, the negotiation of their cultural identity is of paramountconcern. Their efforts to come to terms with - and change - predominantnotions of national identity have served to fuel the discussion about Eng-iishness. The notion of Britishness has not proved to be very attractive tothese minorities. After all, as John Fowles's essay 'On Being English butnot British''^ illustrates, Engiishness is still associated with freedom andjustice, while Britishness is closely connected with the British Empireand those attitudes and institutions which enabled the British to conquer,govern, and exploit so many indigenous peoples. The older, positive viewof Engiishness therefore still seems to be attractive to those whose rootsare in the former colonies and who are determined to modify and enlargethe available conceptions of Engiishness in such a way that it will accom-modate a mix of ethnicities. As novelist Andrea Levy succinctly put it, 'IfEngiishness does not define me, then redefine Engiishness'.''* Novelistslike Zadie Smith, Hanif Kureishi, and Meera Syal, to name but a few, aredoing just that.

'^ It is both ironic and significant that Major simply alludes to a popular nostalgic fea-ture of 'rural England' and turns it into a feature of Britishness. For bibliographicalreferences to Major's misquoting see the article of Reichl in the present volume; TonyBlair's politics are discussed in Bemd Becker, Politik in Grofibritannien: Einfiihrung indas politische System und Bilanz der ersten Regierungsjahre Tony Blairs (Paderborn:Schoningh, 2002).

" See John Fowles, 'On Being English but not British', in Wormholes: Essays and Occa-sional Writings, ed. Jan Relf (London: Cape, 1998), pp. 79-88.

'"* Quoted in Mark Stein,'The Black British "Bildungsroman" and the Transformation ofBritain', in Unity in Diversity Revisited, eds. Barbara Korte and Klaus Peter Mliller(Tubingen: Gunter Narr, 1998), 89-105, p. 89.

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Since Englishness is intricately interwoven with important culturaland political concerns, it comes as no surprise that scholars approach itfrom a wide range of different angles. In the following, I want to drawattention to some of the most important trends of contemporary studies ofEnglishness. There are quite a few books which try to find out just whatit is that distinguishes the English from other nations. In the tradition ofNikolaus Pevsner, who analysed the Englishness of English art in 1956,the renowned historian Paul Langford singles out significant mannersand characteristics that were and in some cases still are dear to English-men—and quite often strange to foreigners—in his study EnglishnessIdentified: Manners and Character 1650-1850 (2000).'^ In his enjoyableand popular book The English: A Portrait of a People (1998), the journalistJeremy Paxman takes a more ambivalent stance, deconstructing the verynotion that there is an 'Anglo-Saxon' people, and emphasizing instead theheterogeneous nature of the forefathers of the present-day population. Inspite of this deconstructivist stance, however, Paxman points to severalfeatures which are characteristic of the English, drawing on opinion-polls,literature, and personal experiences in order to exemplify his findings.Anthony Easthope's Englishness and National Culture (1999) also bearswitness to the contemporary interest in Englishness from a cultural studiespoint of view.'^ Like Paxman—and Barnes in England, England,—East-hope displays a critical attitude to a wide range of characteristics held tobe typically English. He also rejects the notion that 'true' Englishness isa thing of the past, devoting half of his book to current manifestations ofthe national character in discourses like journalism or historiography.

The topic of Englishness is, moreover, closely connected to the ques-tion of national identity, and has therefore attracted the attention of manysociologists and historians. Undoubtedly the most important scholarlycontribution to that field is Linda Colley's book Britons: Eorging theNation 1707-1837 (1992).''' CoUey investigates the way British identitywas forged from the Act of Union until the middle of the nineteenth cen-tury, closing off with some pertinent remarks on the process of devolutionwhich now endangers the common identity that cost the British so much toconstruct in the first place. According to Colley, two aspects are of overallimportance in this process. First, the Protestantism of the British and their

Paul Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character, 1650-1850 (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2000).See Anthony Easthope, Englishness and National Culture (London: Routledge,1999).Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707-1837 (New Haven/ London: YaleUniversity Press, 1992).

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hatred of 'Popery and wooden shoes', and secondly, the fact that from theearly eighteenth century onwards, Britain was involved in a series of wars,which increased the need for distinguishing themselves from their enemiesand forging a sense of national unity.'*

While Colley remains pretty vague about the values that make up thecore of British national identity, others have gone on to tackle just thisquestion. There are different approaches to this issue, and quite a few startwith Benedict Anderson's insight that a nation is an imagined community,'because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most oftheir fellow-members [...] yet in the minds of each lives the image of theircommunion'.'^ In spite of many important differences (for instance as faras the relevance of geographical boundaries, and the attitude to the variousstrands in the study of nationalism are concerned), most of the pertinentpublications of Anthony D. Smith, Eric Hobsbawm, Peter Burke, RaphaelSamuel, and Roy Porter assume that the popular construction of nationalhistory plays an important part in the process in which national identity isshaped, as it provides the basic pattern for the values and characteristicsthat are held to be specifically English. Imagining a common history—par-ticularly a 'golden age'—creates one of the major bonds between membersof national communities. The 'cultural memory' of such communities iscentral to forging and maintaining a common identity. Nowadays, manystudies proceed from the assumption that a nation and, indeed, 'any imag-ined community, is held together in part by the stories it generates aboutitself'.20

The extent to which there has to be an authentic core around which anation constructs its history and identity is a subject of hot debate.-^' Mostscholars, among them particularly Raphael Samuel and Roy Porter, tacitlyassume that myths, icons, and symbols provide important insights into

See, for instance, Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cam-bridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread ofNationalism (London: Verso, 199t [1983]), p. 6.Stephen Arata, Fictions of Loss in the Victorian Fin de Siecle (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1996), p. 1.Anthony Smith, for instance, insists upon a certain amount of truth in the stories andfounding myths that a large majority of the members of a community can identify with.Only then, he insists, are such stories and values able to inspire the people to acts of self-sacrifice and heroism. Anthony D. Smith,'The "Golden Age" and National Renewal',in Myths and Nationhood, eds. Geoffrey Hosking and George Schopflin (London:Routledge, t997). See also: Anthony D. Smith, Chosen Peoples: Sacred Sources ofNational Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). For a German study of theideal of 'Merry England' see Gtinther Blaicher, Merry England: Zur Bedeutung undFunktion eines englischen Autostereotyps (Tubingen: Gunter Narr, 2000).

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national values.-^^ Eric Hobsbawm's and Terence Ranger's groundbreak-ing volume The Invention of Tradition moreover illustrates that rituals andimages held to have been representative of a nation since time immemorialare sometimes of surprisingly recent origin; they are inventions that tendto reflect the present-day values and needs of a community .- ^ The veryconcern with Englishness can be cited as an example of the need to go backto history in order to come to terms with one's present situation. After all,Raphael Samuel's three volume study Patriotism,^'* in which major mythsand icons were subjected to historical investigation, was triggered by thegeneral euphoria for the Falkland War, which seemed to confirm Thatch-er's belief that the British had certain character traits which leftist writersfound difficult to stomach. The present heightened interest in Englishness,which manifests itself both in fictional and scholarly works should there-fore be situated in the context of globalisation, the unification of Europe,the process of devolution, and the need of the immigrant minorities tonegotiate their place in the community.

Englishness has therefore become an important topic for English stud-ies, for literary studies as well as for cultural studies. While the explorationof Englishness in the context of cultural studies usually concentrates onpopular present-day concerns and phenomena, its investigation in literarystudies tends to focus on more or less well known literary works. Both linesof analysis have contributed new insights into traditional ideals and mythslike rural Englishness; they have also demonstrated an increasing concernwith Englishness from a post-colonial perspective. Moreover, interdisci-plinary approaches have contributed to our understanding of Englishness,which has also been enhanced by extending the range of sources to maps,photos, films, pictures, and other documents. Quite often, the conceptsand insights of historians (for instance the concept of 'invented traditions'or 'collective memory'), sociologists (e.g. the relation between autostere-otypes and heterostereotypes) and anthropologists have led to a heightenedawareness of the importance of Englishness in the past and

See, for instance Myths of the English, ed. Roy Porter (Cambridge; Polity Press,1992).For a more detailed account cf. The Invention of Tradition, eds. Eric Hobsbawm andTerence Ranger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992 ['1983]), pp. 1-14.Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, ed. Samuel Rap-hael (London: Routledge, 1989).See, for instance, David Gervais, Literary Englands: Versions of 'Englishness' In Mod-ern Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), Silvia Mergenthal, AFast-Eorward Version of England: Constructions of Englishness in Contemporary Fic-tion (Heidelberg: Winter, 2003), and Elizabeth Helsinger, Rural Scenes and NationalRepresentation: Britain, 1815-1850 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

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The plethora of approaches as well as the political and cultural impor-tance of Engiishness indicate that the concern with alleged national char-acteristics is not a topic that is only important to English studies in Britain.Given the topical relevance of national identity in the context of Europeanunification, it seems pertinent to ask in what ways the debates about Eng-iishness have been taken up in English departments around Europe. Whatare the topics, methods, and media favoured in present-day investigationsoutside Britain? Which insights can be gleaned from current explorationsof Engiishness in different European countries?

Addressing these questions, the present volume can be regarded asan echo-chamber of European reflections of Engiishness, some of whichdevelop lines of investigations that have been sketched above, while oth-ers approach the topic from new angles. The main concerns which emergeare the following: first, most of the essays collected in this volume showthat research on Engiishness often broadens the scope of traditional philo-logical interests. Literary works which foreground Engiishness often playwith intertextual references to texts or authors that are held to be typicallyEnglish. References to the English landscape, famous artists, politicians orexplorers, and significant historical events or myths cannot only be foundin the works of Barnes and Ackroyd. They form a feature that is commonto many contemporary fictional explorations of Engiishness, and literarycritics interested in this topic quite often no longer confine themselvesto traditional philological methods; they rather take into considerationinsights and methods developed by historians like Eric Hobsbawm orpolitical scientists like Benedict Anderson. The importance of conceptstaken from other disciplines is highlighted in Raphael Ingelbien's essay'Imagined Communities / Imagined Solitudes: Versions of Engiishnessin Postwar Literature'. As the title of the article indicates, Ingelbien isconcerned with Benedict Anderson's influential idea of the nation as an'imagined community', the relevance of which he tests with regard to twowell-known postwar authors, Ted Hughes and Peter Ackroyd. AlthoughIngelbien challenges the very adequacy of the concept, arguing that anauthor like Ted Hughes should rather be taken to construct Engiishnessfrom a basis that 'both needs and feeds solitude', his critical appraisal ofthe concept of 'imagined communities' and his long introductory sectiondemonstrate the importance of interdisciplinarity for English studies ingeneral and for explorations of Engiishness in particular.

Whereas Ingelbien deals with canonical, conservative authors, PilarCuder-Dominguez engages in a discussion of Engiishness from a post-colonial perspective, thus exemplifying a quite different approach to thetopic. By taking into consideration the post-colonial rewriting of former

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'Anglo-Saxon' versions of national self-images, critics like her havehighlighted the exclusive nature of nostalgic accounts of Englishness andpointed to many works which deal with attempts to redefine Englishness.In her essay 'Ethnic Cartographies of London in Bernardine Evaristoand Zadie Smith', Cuder-Dominguez provides a short overview of themost celebrated novels which deal with Englishness from a postcolonialperspective, and analyses three important contemporary representationsof Englishness situated in London, at 'the heart of Englishness as a mul-tiethnic, multicultural city alive with contrasts'. By concentrating onEvaristo and Smith, Cuder-Dominguez not only explores the perspectiveof two contemporary female authors of mixed-race backgrounds, she alsotraces the puzzles surrounding the multiethnic experiences in London andthe concomitant problems of identities back as far as the third centuryA.D.

A third tendency among literary critics who deal with Englishness ishighlighted in the essays by Maroula Joannou and Susanne Reichl, whosecontributions show the importance of paintings, films, music, and othersymbolic artefacts in any attempt to come to grips with the elusive natureof Englishness. Maroula Joannou investigates the complex negotiations ofEnglishness and English national identity in her essay 'Powell, Pressburgerand Englishness', which focuses on films by Michael Powell and EmericPressburger. As the essay demonstrates, these films, produced in the1940s, construct Englishness against the background of the Second WorldWar and English cultural nationalism of the time. By underscoring the ref-erences to English literature and old-fashioned English values prevalent inthe films, while at the same time emphasizing the gaps and breaks in theirconstruction of Englishness (which feature, for instance, the rare image ofa 'good German'), Joannou's essay shows both the importance of histori-cal events to notions of national identity and the internal contradictions inmany representations of Englishness.

Susanne Reichl's article explores Englishness from the perspective ofcultural studies. Reichl's starting point is the insight that, 'in times of an"identity crisis" of the English as well as the British, it is hardly surprisingthat the flag, the national symbol number one, is undergoing close scrutinyby those who fly it as well as those who would rather bum it'. Her highlytopical article which concentrates on quite different interpretations andexploitations of the renewed interest in St. George's Cross and the UnionJack takes into account popular phenomena like pop music lyrics and evenfashion trends. As the subtitle, 'the intricate semiotics of national identity'indicates, however, Reichl does not simplistically assume that a nationalsymbol has an easily defineable meaning; she rather uses semiotic assump-

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tions in order to interpret flags as polysemic signs that only seem easy todecode.

Taken together, the essays in this volume also represent a fourthtendency in the study of Englishness, the concentration on English self-images, on the way the British come to terms with their own cultural iden-tity. It is only fitting, however, that a collection of essays by authors fromall over Europe does not limit itself to this line of investigation. Thus theessays feature not only English, Spanish, Austrian, Belgian, and Germanexplorations of the indigenous perspective on Englishness; the volume alsoincludes a European view 'from the outside', thereby representing another,less well-known approach to Englishness, that of exploring 'images offriends and enemies'.-^^

Seen through a Scandinavian lens, the construct of Englishness whichcomes to the fore is less than admirable - and it rarely features in the usualaccounts of the topic. The view of Englishness that is presented in JensRahbek Rasmussen's essay might well be subsumed under the term 'Per-fidious Albion', a phenomenon that is conspicuously lacking in many otherexplorations of Englishness. In his essay 'Love and Hate among Nations:Britain in the Scandinavian Mirror, 1800-1920', which includes viewsfrom Denmark, Sweden, and Norway, Rasmussen not only shows howthe images we have of other nations change over time; he also illustratesthat European constructs of Englishness depend on the specific historicalcircumstances, while at the same time emphasizing that the respectivediplomatic relations between a country like Denmark on the one hand,and Great Britain as well as Germany on the other hand, in themselvesdo not suffice to explain the prevalent image of England. Since popularimages sometimes contradict political trends, it becomes necessary todevelop strategies such as the production of a narrative 'that could medi-ate between popular memory and political necessity'. Drawing on a widerange of fictional and non-fictional sources, Rasmussen reminds us of thefact that attitudes towards Englishness are quite often contradictory, as iswitnessed, for instance, in the coexistence of emotional attitude of dis-tance, contempt, and often hatred with the more conciliatory one based onpolitical realism that marked Danish and Norwegian reactions to Englandin the nineteenth century. Finally, Rasmussen's essay serves to emphasizethe validity of Philip Dodd's insight that 'the definition of the English is

In Germany the investigation of 'Freund- und Feindbilder' is quite popular. See, forinstance, Deutschlandbilder im Spiegel anderer Nadonen, ed. Klaus Stierstorfer (Rein-bek: Rowohlt, 2003).

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inseparable from that of the non-English; Englishness is not so much acategory as a relationship'.-^^

The view from the outside, the attempt to come to grips with English-ness from a non-English perspective is also prevalent in Jlirgen Schlaeger'sthought-provoking essay 'Continuities'. Challenging poststructural concep-tions of fragmented, constantly moving and shifting identities, Schlaegerasks whether 'we really think that the Britain we visit is no longer rec-ognizable by its distinct life-style, customs and mores, by its signs andsounds, sights and smells?' Though he carefully avoids essentialist notionsof national character, he argues that living in the UK and being exposed toa school system governed by common standards and teaching methods aswell as to common ways of thought and behaviour, fosters the developmentof a mindset that, from the outside, can be taken to be typically English.Since behavioural patterns and pre-conscious assumptions change veryslowly, Schlaeger claims that one can identify some continuities that havegoverned English attitudes and behaviour from the seventeenth centuryonwards. He emphasizes the importance of empiricism and, taking SamuelPepys as an example, points to this 'archetypal' Englishman's practice ofoperating at least three different sets of attitudes and behaviour, sets whichSchlaeger identifies as 'private self, 'secret self, and 'public self-fashion-ing'. The pragmatic application of different codes of conduct in differenteveryday situations is for Schlaeger just one of the typical consequencesof English empiricism. 'Muddling through' is another one. In this waythe paper disconnects the concepts of Englishness from its traditional setsof icons and heroes, from the highlights of national history and from thefurore created by devolution and the four nations discourse and anchors itprovocatively in a tongue duree behavioural structure that still shapes andinforms much of what goes on in the UK today.

In sum: The various European explorations of Englishness in this issueillustrate recent trends in English studies. On the one hand, this volumetestifies to the growing importance of a cultural approach and the needto broaden the object of investigation beyond the well-known canonicaltexts. It also demonstrates that the cultural turn of the philologies resultedin a heightened awareness of the 'cultural context' and the integration ofinsights, concepts, and methods from other disciplines, thereby enlargingthe analytical tool kit of English philology with concepts and methodstaken from other disciplines like semiotics or cultural history. On the other

Philip Dodd, 'Englishness and the National Culture', in Englishness: Politics andCulture 1880-1920, eds. Robert Colls and Philip Dodd (London: Croom Helm, 1986),1-28, p. 12.

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hand, it illustrates that the 'cultural turn' does not necessarily lead to aneglect of literature or close readings of canonical works, as is witnessed,for instance in the investigation of the works of Ted Hughes or Peter Ack-royd.

The references to politicians like Tony Blair and even singers likeBilly Bragg in the essays of this volume moreover serve to highlight thatEnglishness is more than just an academic topic. Cultural constructs likeEnglishness may have only tentative moorings in reality, but they are nev-ertheless quite real as far as their consequences—such as racism—are con-cerned. The construction of Englishness and the question of the processesin which notions of Englishness are formed, are especially important in thecontext of European unification, a process which is not exactly acceleratedby the idealisation of and insistence on narrowly defined cultural featureswhich are usually based on the perception of the differences between onenation and another. An awareness of the processes of constructing culturaldifferences and of the way different peoples perceive these differencesis thus of central importance for intercultural understanding in Europetoday.