{"id":898,"date":"2008-04-22T16:53:52","date_gmt":"2008-04-22T16:53:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/?p=898"},"modified":"2009-01-09T17:04:11","modified_gmt":"2009-01-09T17:04:11","slug":"englishness-a-recommended-reading-list","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/2008\/04\/22\/englishness-a-recommended-reading-list\/","title":{"rendered":"ENGLISHNESS, A RECOMMENDED READING LIST"},"content":{"rendered":"

The English Department at Bristol University has a specific course on Englishness<\/a> for final year students, which sounds pretty interesting.<\/p>\n

Introduction
\nWhat 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?<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

For keen readers among you, here is their recommended reading list!<\/p>\n

Peter Ackroyd, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination (Viking, 2002)
\nJane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Oxford, 2004; ed. Fiona Stafford)
\nJulian Barnes, England, England (Picador, 1999)
\nGeoffrey Hill, Collected Poems (Penguin, 1995)
\nRudyard Kipling, The Jungle Book, ed. W.W. Robson (Oxford World’s Classics, 1998)
\nHanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (Faber & Faber, 1991)
\nSpike Milligan, Robin Hood According to Spike Milligan (Virgin, 1999)
\nGeorge Orwell, Coming Up for Air and Keep the Aspidistra Flying in Complete Novels (Penguin, 2000).
\nWilliam Shakespeare, Richard II, Henry IV 1& 2, Henry V (Arden edn of RII, ed. Charles Forker; Oxford edns of remainder, ed. David Bevington, Ren\u00c3\u00a9 Weis, Gary Taylor, respectively)
\nBram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Maurice Hindle (Penguin, 1993)
\nAlfred, Lord Tennyson, Idylls of the King and a Selection of Poems, ed. J.M. Gray (Penguin, 1996)
\nJ.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (Allen and Unwin, 1954-5)
\nP. G. Wodehouse, Uncle Fred in the Springtime (Penguin, 2004)
\nMichael Wood, In Search of England (Penguin, 2000)<\/p>\n

Essays
\nDue in weeks 4 and 12
\nSuggested Weekly Plan [some selections may change]<\/p>\n

1. Reading Week<\/p>\n

2. Introduction: Robin Hood
\nJulian Barnes, England, England (Picador, 1999)
\nSpike Milligan, Robin Hood According to Spike Milligan (Virgin, 1999)
\n‘Robin Hood and Guy of Gisborn’ [course reader]
\nMichael Wood, ‘Merrie Englande: The Legende of Robin Hood’ in In Search of England (Penguin, 2000), 71-90.<\/p>\n

3. Anglo-Saxon Origins
\nBenedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (Verso, 1991), 1-46 [course reader]
\nThe Battle of Maldon (Norton I, 103)
\nBeowulf, trans. Seamus Heaney (Norton I, 29)
\nThorlac Turville-Petre, ‘The Nation’ in England and the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290-1340 (Clarendon, 1996), 1-26 [course reader]
\nT.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]
\nJ.R.R. Tolkien, ‘Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics’, Proceedings of the British Academy 22 (1936) [course reader]
\nMichael Wood, ‘The Norman Yoke’ and ‘When Was England England?’ in In Search of England, 1-22, 91-106<\/p>\n

4. King Arthur
\nGeoffrey of Monmouth (Norton I, 115)
\nLayamon, from Brut (Norton I, 122)
\n‘The Myth of Arthur’s Return’ (Norton I, 124)
\nThomas Malory, Morte Darthur (Norton I, 419)
\nWilliam Morris (Norton II, 1605)
\nAlfred, 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’
\n[Tennyson, Idylls of the King (Norton II, 1282)]
\nMichael Wood, ‘Glastonbury, the Grail and the Isle of Avalon’ in In Search of England, 43-70<\/p>\n

5. Reflections [essay week]
\nGeoffrey Hill, Collected Poems (Penguin, 1995) [especially ‘Mercian Hymns’, 105-34]
\n[Geoffrey Hill (Norton II, 2717)]
\nPhilip Larkin (Norton II, 2564)<\/p>\n

6. Shakespeare and History
\nRichard II, Henry IV 1 & 2, Henry V (Arden edn of RII, ed. Charles Forker; Oxford edns of remainder, ed. David Bevington, Ren\u00c3\u00a9 Weis, Gary Taylor, respectively)
\nMake sure you also study the passages from Holinshed in these editions<\/p>\n

7. Gothic
\nEdmund 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]
\nSamuel Johnson, Prefaces to Dictionary and Shakespeare, and Lives (Norton I, 2719)
\nJohn Ruskin (Norton II, 1425)
\nBram Stoker, Dracula, ed. Maurice Hindle (Penguin, 1993)<\/p>\n

8. Romantic Ecology
\nWilliam Blake, ‘And did those feet’ (Norton II, 85)
\nJohn Clare (Norton II, 802)
\nRobert Coll, ‘England as a Garden’ in The Identity of England (OUP, 2002), 203-11.
\nWilliam Cowper (Norton I, 2875)
\nJohn Keats, ‘To Autumn’ (Norton II, 872)
\nAndrew Marvell, Garden Poems and ‘Upon Appleton House’ (Norton I, 1694, 1704)
\nJames Thomson (Norton I, 2822)
\nWilliam Wordsworth, The Prelude (Norton II, 303)<\/p>\n

9. Temper and Class
\nJane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (Oxford, 2004; ed. Fiona Stafford)
\nDaniel Defoe, ‘The True-Born Englishman’ (course reader)
\nJeremy Paxman, ‘The Ideal Englishman’, in The English (Penguin, 1999), 176-206 [course reader]
\nP. G. Wodehouse, Uncle Fred in the Springtime (Penguin, 2004)<\/p>\n

10. Empire
\nEmpire (Norton II, 2017)
\nBenedict Anderson, ‘Census, Map, Museum’ in Imagined Communities, 163-86 [course reader]
\nRudyard Kipling (Norton II, 1863); The Jungle Book, ed. W.W. Robson (Oxford World’s Classics, 1998)
\nHanif Kureishi, The Buddha of Suburbia (Faber & Faber, 1991)
\nSalman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (Penguin, 1992) [course reader]
\nMichael Wood, ‘Epilogue: An English Family’ in In Search of England, 292-306<\/p>\n

11. The Wars
\nPoetry of the Great War (Norton II, 2048)
\nPoetry of the Second World War (Norton II, 2525)
\nGeorge Orwell (Norton II, 2456)
\nGeorge Orwell, Coming Up for Air and Keep the Aspidistra Flying in Complete Novels (Penguin, 2000)<\/p>\n

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

Further Reading
\nBenedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (Verso, 1991)
\nAntony Easthope, Englishness and National Culture (Routledge, 1998)
\nJonathan Bate, Romantic Ecology (Routledge, 1991)
\nJonathan Bate, The Song of the Earth (Picador, 2001)
\nIan Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire and the Locations of Identity (Princeton University Press, 1998)
\nAngus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz (Pimlico, 1992)
\nDavid Peters Corbett, The Geographies of Englishness: Landscape and the National Past, 1880-1940 (Yale University Press, 2002)
\nThe Country and the City Revisited, ed. Gerald MacLean, Donna Landry, and Joseph Patrick Ward (Cambridge UP, 1999)
\nDavid Crystal, The Stories of English (Penguin, 2004)
\nEngland and Its Aesthetes: John Ruskin, Walter Pater, Adrian Stokes, ed. David Carter (Routledge, 1997)
\nEnglishness, ed. Philip Dodd and Robert Colls (Routledge, 1987)
\nPaul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford UP, 1975)
\nSamuel Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (Columbia University Press, 1997)
\nStephen Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians (Oxford UP, 2001)
\nPaul Gilroy, There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (Routledge, 1987)
\nPeter Haydon, Beer and Britannia (Sutton, 2001)
\nStephen Knight, Robin Hood (Blackwell, 1994)
\nKrishan Kumar, The Making of English National Identity (Cambridge University Press, 2003)
\nDonna Landry, The Invention of the Countryside (Palgrave, 2001)
\nPaul Langford, Englishness Identified: Manners and Character 1650-1850 (Oxford UP, 2001)
\nLiterature in the Modern World: ‘Englishness’, ed. A. Calder, R. Day, G. Martin (Open UP, 1991)
\nJohn Lucas, England and Englishness: Ideas of Nationhood in English Poetry, 1668-1900 (Hogarth, 1991)
\nDavid Matless, Landscape and Englishness (Reaktion, 2001)
\nNikolaus Pevsner, The Englishness of English Art (Penguin, 1993)
\nOur Englishness, ed. Tony Linsell (Anglo-Saxon, 2000)
\nJeremy Paxman, The English (Penguin, 1999)
\nThe Post-colonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, Helen Tiffin (Routledge, 1994)
\nRobin Hood: An Anthology of Scholarship and Criticism, ed. Stephen Knight (Brewer, 1999)
\nSalman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (Penguin, 1992)
\nEdward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (Viking, 1994)
\nSimon Schama, History of Britain (BBC, 2002)
\nRoger Scruton, England: An Elegy (Pimlico, 2001)
\nT.A. Shippey, J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (HarperCollins, 2000)
\nT.A. Shippey, Literary Appropriations of the Anglo-Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century (CUP, 2000)
\nGary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare (Chatto & Windus, 1990)
\nThorlac Turville-Petre, England and the Nation: Language, Literature, and National Identity, 1290-1340 (Clarendon, 1996)
\nWendy Webster, Englishness and Empire 1939-1965 (Oxford University Press, 2005)
\nRaymond Williams, The Country and the City (Hogarth, 1985)
\nThe White Man’s Burdens, ed Chris Brooks and Peter Faulkner (Exeter UP, 1996)
\nP.G. Wodehouse, Life at Blandings (Penguin, 1981)
\nP.G. Wodehouse, Imperial Blandings (Penguin, 1993)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[6,36],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/898"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=898"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/898\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":903,"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/898\/revisions\/903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/we-english.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}