The English Department at Bristol University has a specific course on Englishness for final year students, which sounds pretty interesting.

Introduction
What does it mean to be English – not British, but specifically English – and why should it matter? What national and cultural qualities does the word identify, and what has it meant in the past? Perhaps most importantly, what is the future of Englishness, and what is the future of England?

These are pressing cultural issues, and many literary critics, historians, and writers have recently turned their attention to such questions. They are also concerns that have a long history in English Literature, and have been debated and discussed for centuries. This course offers an introduction to Englishness, both its history and its literature, and presents a diverse (and ambitious) variety of material from the twelfth century to the present day. It gives a broad historical overview of certain English figures, such as King Arthur and Robin Hood, develops certain themes that characterize English identity – the Gothic, Landscape, Empire, Temper – and examines the literature of historical events such as the First and Second World Wars. The course argues that historically, Englishness has been characterized by mongrelism, hybridity, the spirit of compromise and adaptation, and linguistic capaciousness and absorption, and endeavours to explain why certain attitudes persist and how others change, and ultimately what constitutes Englishness.

For keen readers among you, here is their recommended reading list!

Peter Ackroyd, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (Viking, 2002)
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Oxford, 2004; ed. Fiona Stafford)
Julian Barnes, England, England (Picador, 1999)
Geoffrey Hill, Collected Poems (Penguin, 1995)
Rudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book, ed. W.W. Robson (Oxford World’s Classics, 1998)
Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (Faber & Faber, 1991)
Spike Milligan, Robin Hood According to Spike Milligan (Virgin, 1999)
George Orwell, Coming Up for Air and Keep the Aspidistra Flying in Complete Novels (Penguin, 2000).
William Shakespeare, Richard II, Henry IV 1& 2, Henry V (Arden edn of RII, ed. Charles Forker; Oxford edns of remainder, ed. David Bevington, René Weis, Gary Taylor, respectively)
Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Maurice Hindle (Penguin, 1993)
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King and a Selection of Poems, ed. J.M. Gray (Penguin, 1996)
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (Allen and Unwin, 1954-5)
P. G. Wodehouse, Uncle Fred in the Springtime (Penguin, 2004)
Michael Wood, In Search of England (Penguin, 2000)

Essays
Due in weeks 4 and 12
Suggested Weekly Plan [some selections may change]

1. Reading Week

2. Introduction: Robin Hood
Julian Barnes, England, England (Picador, 1999)
Spike Milligan, Robin Hood According to Spike Milligan (Virgin, 1999)
‘Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborn’ [course reader]
Michael Wood, ‘Merrie Englande: The Legende of Robin Hood’ in In Search of England (Penguin, 2000), 71-90.

3. Anglo-Saxon Origins
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (Verso, 1991), 1-46 [course reader]
The Battle of Maldon (Norton I, 103)
Beowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney (Norton I, 29)
Thorlac Turville-Petre, ‘The Nation’ in England and the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290-1340 (Clarendon, 1996), 1-26 [course reader]
T.A. Shippey, ‘The Undeveloped Image: Anglo-Saxon in Popular Consciousness from Turner to Tolkien’ in Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century (CUP, 2000), 215-36 [course reader]
J.R.R. Tolkien, ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, Proceedings of the British Academy 22 (1936) [course reader]
Michael Wood, ‘The Norman Yoke’ and ‘When Was England England?’ in In Search of England, 1-22, 91-106

4. King Arthur
Geoffrey of Monmouth (Norton I, 115)
Layamon, from Brut (Norton I, 122)
‘The Myth of Arthur’s Return’ (Norton I, 124)
Thomas Malory, Morte Darthur (Norton I, 419)
William Morris (Norton II, 1605)
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King and a Selection of Poems, ed. J.M. Gray (Penguin, 1996): focus on the ‘Dedication’, ‘The Coming of Arthur’, ‘The Holy Grail’, ‘The Passing of Arthur’, and ‘To the Queen’
[Tennyson, Idylls of the King (Norton II, 1282)]
Michael Wood, ‘Glastonbury, the Grail and the Isle of Avalon’ in In Search of England, 43-70

5. Reflections [essay week]
Geoffrey Hill, Collected Poems (Penguin, 1995) [especially ‘Mercian Hymns’, 105-34]
[Geoffrey Hill (Norton II, 2717)]
Philip Larkin (Norton II, 2564)

6. Shakespeare and History
Richard II, Henry IV 1 & 2, Henry V (Arden edn of RII, ed. Charles Forker; Oxford edns of remainder, ed. David Bevington, René Weis, Gary Taylor, respectively)
Make sure you also study the passages from Holinshed in these editions

7. Gothic
Edmund Burke, from Reflections on the Revolution in France (Norton II, 121); ‘A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful’ [course reader]
Samuel Johnson, Prefaces to Dictionary and Shakespeare, and Lives (Norton I, 2719)
John Ruskin (Norton II, 1425)
Bram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Maurice Hindle (Penguin, 1993)

8. Romantic Ecology
William Blake, ‘And did those feet’ (Norton II, 85)
John Clare (Norton II, 802)
Robert Coll, ‘England as a Garden’ in The Identity of England (OUP, 2002), 203-11.
William Cowper (Norton I, 2875)
John Keats, ‘To Autumn’ (Norton II, 872)
Andrew Marvell, Garden Poems and ‘Upon Appleton House’ (Norton I, 1694, 1704)
James Thomson (Norton I, 2822)
William Wordsworth, The Prelude (Norton II, 303)

9. Temper and Class
Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Oxford, 2004; ed. Fiona Stafford)
Daniel Defoe, ‘The True-Born Englishman’ (course reader)
Jeremy Paxman, ‘The Ideal Englishman’, in The English (Penguin, 1999), 176-206 [course reader]
P. G. Wodehouse, Uncle Fred in the Springtime (Penguin, 2004)

10. Empire
Empire (Norton II, 2017)
Benedict Anderson, ‘Census, Map, Museum’ in Imagined Communities, 163-86 [course reader]
Rudyard Kipling (Norton II, 1863); The Jungle Book, ed. W.W. Robson (Oxford World’s Classics, 1998)
Hanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (Faber & Faber, 1991)
Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (Penguin, 1992) [course reader]
Michael Wood, ‘Epilogue: An English Family’ in In Search of England, 292-306

11. The Wars
Poetry of the Great War (Norton II, 2048)
Poetry of the Second World War (Norton II, 2525)
George Orwell (Norton II, 2456)
George Orwell, Coming Up for Air and Keep the Aspidistra Flying in Complete Novels (Penguin, 2000)

12. Reinventing the Mythology of England
Chris Hopkins, ‘Tolkien and Englishness’ in Proceedings of the J.R.R. Tolkien Centenary Conference, ed. Reynolds and Goodnight, 278-80 (course reader)
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (Allen and Unwin, 1954-5) [especially descriptions of the Shire in books one and six]

Further Reading
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (Verso, 1991)
Antony Easthope, Englishness and National Culture (Routledge, 1998)
Jonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology (Routledge, 1991)
Jonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (Picador, 2001)
Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity (Princeton University Press, 1998)
Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (Pimlico, 1992)
David Peters Corbett, The Geographies of Englishness: Landscape and the National Past, 1880-1940 (Yale University Press, 2002)
The Country and the City Revisited, ed. Gerald MacLean, Donna Landry, and Joseph Patrick Ward (Cambridge UP, 1999)
David Crystal, The Stories of English (Penguin, 2004)
England and Its Aesthetes: John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Adrian Stokes, ed. David Carter (Routledge, 1997)
Englishness, ed. Philip Dodd and Robert Colls (Routledge, 1987)
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford UP, 1975)
Samuel Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (Columbia University Press, 1997)
Stephen Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford UP, 2001)
Paul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (Routledge, 1987)
Peter Haydon, Beer and Britannia (Sutton, 2001)
Stephen Knight, Robin Hood (Blackwell, 1994)
Krishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2003)
Donna Landry, The Invention of the Countryside (Palgrave, 2001)
Paul Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character 1650-1850 (Oxford UP, 2001)
Literature in the Modern World: ‘Englishness’, ed. A. Calder, R. Day, G. Martin (Open UP, 1991)
John Lucas, England and Englishness: Ideas of Nationhood in English Poetry, 1668-1900 (Hogarth, 1991)
David Matless, Landscape and Englishness (Reaktion, 2001)
Nikolaus Pevsner, The Englishness of English Art (Penguin, 1993)
Our Englishness, ed. Tony Linsell (Anglo-Saxon, 2000)
Jeremy Paxman, The English (Penguin, 1999)
The Post-colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin (Routledge, 1994)
Robin Hood: An Anthology of Scholarship and Criticism, ed. Stephen Knight (Brewer, 1999)
Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (Penguin, 1992)
Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (Viking, 1994)
Simon Schama, History of Britain (BBC, 2002)
Roger Scruton, England: An Elegy (Pimlico, 2001)
T.A. Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (HarperCollins, 2000)
T.A. Shippey, Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century (CUP, 2000)
Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare (Chatto & Windus, 1990)
Thorlac Turville-Petre, England and the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290-1340 (Clarendon, 1996)
Wendy Webster, Englishness and Empire 1939-1965 (Oxford University Press, 2005)
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Hogarth, 1985)
The White Man’s Burdens, ed Chris Brooks and Peter Faulkner (Exeter UP, 1996)
P.G. Wodehouse, Life at Blandings (Penguin, 1981)
P.G. Wodehouse, Imperial Blandings (Penguin, 1993)

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