An Imaginary England: Nation, Landscape and Literature, 1840-1920 by Roger Ebbatson

Abstract

844 Reviews An Imaginary England: Nation, Landscape and Literature, I840-I920. By ROGER EBBATSON. Aldershot: Ashgate. 2005. viii + 232 pp. ?50. ISBN 978-o-7546 5092-8. In the introduction toAn Imaginary England Roger Ebbatson declares his indebt edness to previous works of cultural geography, notably John Lucas's England and Englishness: Ideas ofNationhood inEnglish Poetry, I688-I900 (London: Hogarth, I990) and David Gervais's Literary Englands: Versions of 'Englishness' inModern Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). He does sowhile announc ing theaim of going beyond previous studies. Ebbatson promises 'amore theoretically inflected analysis' (p. 6), a work unafraid 'tounmask some of the ideological aspects of landscape representation' (p. 3). Ebbatson's main procedure isdeconstructionist. He reveals the 'binary tropes' (p. i) that underpin national identity, while demonstrating how these stabilities are 'per petually undermined' (p. I). Perhaps conscious that thismethod isnot well adapted to the appraisal of historical texture, he proposes a parallel approach. His 'critique', he admits, is to be 'fundamentally materialist or historicist in itsgeneral tendency' (p. I3), and 'performed through close readings of symptomatic texts'.These comprise Tennyson's English Idylls (sic), Richard Jefferies'sThe Dewy Morn (I884), Quiller Couch's Poison Island (1907), D. H. Lawrence's 'England, My England', and the poetry ofThomas Hardy, Rupert Brooke, and Edward Thomas. Whether a truly sensitive close reading would admit the reductive notion of a 'symptomatic text' isdebatable; it isnevertheless a feature ofEbbatson's task thathe needs to bring theoretic tools to bear in tracing the development of an ideologically infused idea likeEnglishness. Interrogating Englishness cannot preclude recourse to Continental traditions of thought and analysis simply because they are 'foreign' to the object of enquiry. This consideration does not, however, license the application of theoretical material without system and without rigorous justification. Ebbatson flitsbetween Heidegger, Lacan, Barthes, Bakhtin, Benjamin, Adorno, and De Man so casually thatone is left with little more than a hotchpotch of accredited 'insights'. The second prong of the book's theoretic agenda-its attention to binary oppositions yields little that isnot predictable or formulaic. If theattempt to import philosophic rigour is thus threatened, it isequally compro mised by themode of delivery.Although the quality of thewriting isnot uniformly bad, theauthor's overblown prose introduces distraction and obscurity.What is tobe made of a sentence that reads: 'These seminal moments represent attempts, under the pressure ofwar, to reconstitute and define an England of the imaginary in a dialecti cal process thatparadoxically discovers national identity through itsother-moving outwards to imperial margins-while simultaneously plumbing the autochthonous depths of the earth's crust-moving inwards' (p. i)? It is uncharitable to quote at length,but thepoint is a serious one: such a style confuses syntactical and linguistic complexity with thedesired 'theoretically inflectedanalysis'. Propositions warranting methodical and measured explication are not well served by this brand of rhetorical excess. Such shortcomings should not deter approaches to a subject undoubtedly deserv ingof attention. Ebbatson helpfully grounds his discussion in a particular intellectual tradition, the Wordsworthian, or ruralist, conflation of nature and nation. The desire to root identity in the countryside, and to shun industrial civilization, was identified by Martin Wiener in the i980s as heralding a new insularity conducive to rela tive economic decline. At itsbest, An Imaginary England complicates and questions Wiener's analysis. It demonstrates that the proponents of this outlook were as con cerned with 'border country' aswith centrality, and as dependent in theirconception MLR, I02.3,2007 845 of Englishness upon imperial 'hybridity' (p. 2) as upon the imagined coherence of folkconsciousness or homeland. UNIVERSITY OF SHEFFIELD MARCUS WAITHE Faculty Towers: The Academic Novel and itsDiscontents. By ELAINE SHOWALTER. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2005. vii+ i66 PP. ?I2.99. ISBN 978-o-Ig-928332-3. Elaine Showalter's study focuses on what is commonly referred to as the 'campus' novel, which periodically she refers to as theProfessorroman. She implies that for the academic either such texts ought to be endlessly fascinating or their depths should resonate with the experiential, the poignancy of the familiarly observed. I imagine many academic readers will share her interest in this form,one that concerns itself, as Showalter demonstrates, with a very particular and recognizable...