British Life Research Articles

Research on the Improvement of Students’ Intercultural Communication Competence through Electronic English Newspapers Based on Big Data Analysis under the Computer Internet

As you all know, in the international meeting, leaders will attend the meeting, many countries have their own language, in today’s world, English is widely receive language of all countries, is a language spoken by the largest country of 13th session of the National People’s Congress has held smoothly, many policies in China is the world’s attention, such as such as said in a policy. How to improve the intercultural communication ability of college students? Internet communication and electronic English newspapers and magazines are very good choices, which can be applied to people’s English learning and life. Such a method can overcome the shortcomings of traditional education, help teachers improve the effectiveness of cross-cultural communication teaching, and accelerate the cultivation of global trade talents.

Discrimination and mental health outcomes in British Black and South Asian people during the COVID-19 outbreak in the UK

ABSTRACT This study focuses on the impact of the COVID-19 outbreak on mental health outcomes in Black and South Asian people in the United Kingdom. A sample of 226 participants completed a survey consisting of measures of ethnic identification, religiosity, British national identification, perceived discrimination, fear of COVID-19, generalised anxiety, depression and life satisfaction. Black participants reported more frequent ethnic discrimination than South Asians who, conversely, reported more religious discrimination. Structural equation modelling showed that discrimination had a direct impact on fear of COVID-19 and an indirect impact through decreased British national identification and life satisfaction. Religiosity and ethnic identification appeared to be protective against fear of COVID-19. Fear of COVID-19 was in turn associated with increased depression and generalised anxiety and decreased life satisfaction. The results suggest that some minority groups may be facing poorer mental health outcomes due to discrimination and minority stress.

Growing Old with the Welfare State: Eight British Lives. Edited by NickHubble, JennieTaylor and PhilipTew. Bloomsbury Academic. 2019. x + 159pp. £17.99 (pb).

Growing Old with the Welfare State: Eight British Lives. Edited by NickHubble, JennieTaylor and PhilipTew. Bloomsbury Academic. 2019. x + 159pp. £17.99 (pb).

Early American Rebels: Pursuing Democracy from Maryland to Carolina, 1640–1700 by Noeleen McIlvenna

Reviewed by: Early American Rebels: Pursuing Democracy from Maryland to Carolina, 1640–1700 by Noeleen McIlvenna Owen Stanwood Early American Rebels: Pursuing Democracy from Maryland to Carolina, 1640–1700. By Noeleen McIlvenna. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. xiv, 168. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-5606-9; cloth, $90.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-5605-2.) The seventeenth-century Chesapeake abounded with rebels. From Ingle's Rebellion in 1640s Maryland to the intercolonial uprisings in 1689 following [End Page 515] the Glorious Revolution, political strife hit the colonies with some regularity, even bringing down Maryland's proprietary government and threatening to do the same in Virginia and North Carolina. Aside from Bacon's Rebellion, usually considered a key event in early American political development, most of these uprisings have received little attention from historians. In her new book, Noeleen McIlvenna seeks to fill this gap by offering a linked history of political unrest across the later half of the seventeenth century. In her telling, these rebellions were nothing short of attempted revolutions, attempts by "small farmers" to establish "a republic of equals" in the early American South (p. 4). The American story started as an outgrowth of England's own mid-seventeenth-century revolution. In particular, the rise of Oliver Cromwell's New Model Army introduced new, egalitarian impulses into English life, often linked with the liberating theologies of an ascendant radical Protestantism. While previous scholars have paid more attention to connections between revolutionary England and New England, McIlvenna finds radical traces in the Chesapeake as well. In particular, she pays close attention to the Gerard clan, a Maryland family that was active in Maryland politics and soon spread its tentacles around the region, mainly through a series of strategic marriages. McIlvenna uses this family story to underscore the role of women in political movements. While it was the Gerard daughters' husbands who often took the lead in the rebellions, McIlvenna makes the fascinating suggestion, based on a few tantalizing bits of evidence, that many of the most radical ideas came from women rather than men. These rebels had their work cut out for them. On the other side, the royalist Virginia governor William Berkeley and Maryland's proprietors, the Calverts, sought to build a hierarchical society more in line with Stuart England. The struggle between these two visions could become violent, whether in Maryland's battle of the Severn of 1655 or Nathaniel Bacon's burning of Jamestown, Virginia, a decade later. All of these rebellions, obviously, were multifaceted and complex, but McIlvenna contends that they were fundamentally about democracy. Both Virginia and Maryland were notably democratic in their early years—neither had property requirements for voting—and it was rebels like the Gerards who kept this egalitarian vision alive. It was only somewhat later, with the clear move toward chattel slavery, that the dream of a democratic South was more permanently deferred. There is much to admire about this book. McIlvenna deftly links English and American events, and her attention to genealogical detail clarifies the importance of family ties in seventeenth-century American politics. Still, it is hard to accept that the rebels in this story acted in the name of democracy. After all, most were middling (or upper-middling) farmers themselves, and the greatest evidence for their radicalism came from their royalist opponents, who considered leveler and Oliverian to be biting insults. In their own manifestos, moreover, the rebels tended to portray themselves in much more moderate terms, as critics of corruption by "unworthy Favourites and juggling Parasites" (p. 83). More than that, they usually presented their struggle not so much against the king and aristocracy as against diabolical outsiders, almost always Native people and Catholics. In short, one sees not so much an origin story for American democracy as for American populism—the effort by [End Page 516] ambitious politicians to build a movement by exploiting fears of ethnic and religious others. Owen Stanwood Boston College Copyright © 2021 Southern Historical Association

Restoring Creation: The Natural World in the Anglo-Saxon Saints' Lives of Cuthbert and Guthlac by Britton Elliott Brooks

Reviewed by: Restoring Creation: The Natural World in the Anglo-Saxon Saints' Lives of Cuthbert and Guthlac by Britton Elliott Brooks Matthew Firth Brooks, Britton Elliott, Restoring Creation: The Natural World in the Anglo-Saxon Saints' Lives of Cuthbert and Guthlac (Nature and Environment in the Middle Ages), Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2019; hardback; pp. 323; R.R.P. £70.00; ISBN 9781843845300. In Restoring Creation, Britton Elliott Brooks brings the environmental humanities into dialogue with early English hagiography. Specifically, Brooks seeks to present 'the sophisticated and considered engagement with the non-human world' (p. 3) that may be revealed through a close reading of early English hagiography. This [End Page 197] he intends to serve as a corrective to the oversimplifications he perceives in much previous environmental humanities scholarship, which has tended to posit nature as having a negative alterity in the medieval worldview. Central to Brooks's thesis is the idea that it is possible to reconstruct how the English themselves understood the natural world. Representations of nature in early English hagiography, he argues, were defined by 'contemporary theological and philosophical views' (p. 3) and tied to the physical landscape through the regionalism of their narratives. Of those contemporary theological and philosophical views, Brooks focuses on the concept of the restoration of Creation: a breaching of the postlapsarian division between humanity and nature, effected by the achievement of holiness and sanctity. Given the wealth of hagiography from pre-Conquest England, Brooks necessarily limits his focus subjects, choosing to structure his study around the vitae of the eremitic saints Cuthbert and Guthlac. The nature of their eremitism provides the two English saints what Brooks terms a 'direct and transformative interaction with Creation' (p. 15). This is well demonstrated in his case studies; each of Brook's five chapters examines a single hagiography, ordered by chronology of authorship. This structure allows Brooks to demonstrate how the vitae built upon one another, adopting and adapting Augustinian and Bedan exegesis of Creation. Chapter 1 focuses on the anonymous Vita Sancti Cuthberti (698 × 705), examining those passages of the text in which Cuthbert's sanctity restores Creation, albeit temporarily. It is a sanctity that stems from obedience; Cuthbert's obedience restores Creation just as Adam and Eve's disobedience brought about its Fall. Brooks argues that this obedience is specifically framed in monastic terms and suggests that the hagiographer perceived the 'divine order of the universe' (as it relates to the natural world) to parallel monastic order (p. 28). Chapters 2 and 3 turn to Bede, first his metrical Vita Sancti Cuthberti (705 × 716) and then his prose Vita Sancti Cuthberti (c. 721). Brooks's examination of the metrical vita is Restoring Creation's most compelling chapter. It is a work that he at once perceives as personal—'a ruminative and poetic exercise for Bede himself' (p. 67)—and as foundational not only to the Cuthbertine tradition, but to the entry of Augustinian exegeses of Creation into English hagiography. The restoration of Creation here is again tied to monastic obedience, Cuthbert portrayed as what Brooks terms 'an idealized Gregorian monk-pastor' (p. 16). It is a characterization of Cuthbert that comes into full focus in Bede's prose vita. In this text, Brooks identifies an authorial interest in Cuthbert's evolving spiritual maturity—miracles of restoration provide both impetus for and evidence of Cuthbert's achievement of 'spiritual majority' (p. 171). Bede draws on Augustinian interpretations of the Fall and Creation to portray Cuthbert as an exemplar of saintliness and obedience, Creation's own obedience to the saint being predicated on his perfect sanctity. Brooks turns to Guthlac in Chapters 4 and 5, first discussing the Vita Sancti Guthlaci (730 × 740) of Felix before going on to examine the terminological nuances of the Old English Prose Life of Guthlac and Guthlac A (both texts that [End Page 198] have proved difficult to date). What is possibly most interesting in these chapters is the explicit tying of Guthlac's vitae to the landscape of the East Anglian fens. In the Vita Sancti Guthlaci, Brooks sees Guthlac's story, like Cuthbert's, as being one of spiritual progression toward saintliness, but here to some degree...

A Training Program for Developing Basic Skills of English language and Life Skills among Adult Students

A Training Program for Developing Basic Skills of English language and Life Skills among Adult Students

Disability and Life Writing in Post-Independence Ireland by Elizabeth Grubgeld

Reviewed by: Disability and Life Writing in Post-Independence Ireland by Elizabeth Grubgeld Bridget English Disability and Life Writing in Post-Independence Ireland, by Elizabeth Grubgeld (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 182 p., hardcover, $89.99) Disability studies rose to prominence in the late 1990s, and while the field was initially beleaguered with problems of representation and a lack of a clear methodology, it has become increasingly intersectional, focusing attention on the lived experiences of oppressed subjects through the intersections of race, class, gender, and sexual identity. In recent years disability studies has proven particularly enticing to social justice activists and scholars, and to specialists in Irish Studies concerned with postcolonial trauma and embodiment. This scholarship has largely focused on writers like James Joyce and Samuel Beckett, whose work features disabled or immobile characters. Elizabeth Grubgeld's essential new book, Disability and Life Writing in Post-Independence Ireland, departs from these fictional interpretations, instead analyzing nonfictional narratives—specifically autobiography and life writing—to consider how this kind of writing captures the tensions between disability and class, and reveals the ways that private life is shaped by institutional structures. Disability and Life Writing treads the lesser-known terrain of Irish life writing and examines these narratives in correlation with the development of the Irish disability rights movement. In the first chapter Grubgeld distinguishes her work as a literary scholar from that of researchers in politics and sociology and makes a case for the study of life writing that underscores the "relations between disablement and economic inequities, as well as calling into question the individualist sentiment of much public discourse involving disability and the pressure to repress rather than articulate difference." Her aim is to situate these narratives in the context of the colonial and postcolonial state and thus push beyond some of the criticisms that have plagued the larger field of disability studies: namely its failures to move past a middle-class and primarily Anglo-American model. Disability and Life Writing in Post-Independence Ireland successfully bridges the gap between disability studies, Irish cultural history, and the genre of life writing. However, it is worth noting that the majority of the narratives analyzed in Disability and Life Writing are written by cisgendered white men, though Grubgeld does balance these accounts with references to women such as Nuala O'Faolain and longer discussions of the autobiographies of women such as Mossie Forde, Dorine Reihill, and Mary Duffy. Grubgeld is constrained by the published memoirs available to her from this time period, though given the current popularity of this genre, more could be done in the final chapters to address these concerns. The focus also remains on physical impairments, such as blindness and cerebral palsy, rather than intellectual disabilities or mental illness, [End Page 140] which might include more material by women. Grubgeld does acknowledge that women "often produce significant variations on these tropes, and future studies of writings by immigrants and people of diverse ethnicities, sexuality, and ways of life … may uncover entirely different forms of subjectivity and modes of telling" (14), thus paving the way for future scholarship in these areas. The five subsequent chapters each combine disability with another theme: class, testimony, literature, sports, and blogs. These categories reveal the wide-ranging scope of Grubgeld's study and the abundance of material on this topic. The second chapter begins by articulating the book's argument, "that disability life writing in Ireland takes a particular shape influenced by cultural factors and the protocols of genre." Memoirs of blindness are examined in the context of genres such as the bildungsroman and the extent to which these autobiographies challenge the power of religious institutions over private life. For Grubgeld, class is one of the most important factors in determining both the origin and treatment of disability. Thus, Sean O'Casey's autobiography, I Knock at the Door (1939), which attempts to articulate a "collective history of a colonized and subjugated population" but shockingly refuses to incorporate the voices of other disabled children and adults, is contrasted with broadcaster Joe Bollard's memoir Out of Sight (1998), which highlights how the conditions of poverty affect, and in some cases even cause, physical...

Growing Old with the Welfare State: Eight British Lives ed. by Nick Hubble, Jennie Taylor, and Philip Tew

Growing Old with the Welfare State: Eight British Lives ed. by Nick Hubble, Jennie Taylor, and Philip Tew

“A Quiet Life”: Journals, 1974–2014

“A Quiet Life”: Journals, 1974–2014 Thomas McCarthy (bio) from the Archives This article originally appeared in New Hibernia Review 23:3. thomas mccarthy (b. 1954) lives in Cork with his wife. He is the author of several collections of poetry and prose and the recipient of both the Patrick Kavanagh and the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Awards. He attended University College Cork, where he studied under John Montague and was classmates with what Thomas Dillon Redshaw has called “that remarkable generation” of writers who attended UCC at the time. AUGUST 10, 1974 Michael Hartnett has decided to write exclusively in Irish. I can understand the politics of his decision, but from the point of view of poetry it is a huge mistake. Paul Durcan thinks he’s our greatest Southern poet, more lyrical and beautiful than Kinsella, more disciplined than Kennelly. But why is he so easily pushed from the podium of his own voice? English poetry offers endless possibilities, and it can embrace even the most eccentric and parochial kinds of Irishness. So why this rush into the Irish language? Is it a spiritual pursuit of Caitlín Maude or an emotional escape from Seamus Heaney? Perhaps the Irish language will be like a second wife to him: . . . As gold-green mossclose to the barkwhen the winds tossmy limbs to tragedy and dark. But it is sad to lose such a good Munster poet in English. Almost like Ledwidge, but very primary and angry and raw. The delicacy of Anatomy of [a] Cliché is [End Page 145] beautiful, poised, elegant. And this is the problem with switching from English to Irish: is his Irish vocabulary equal to all the suffering and pain of human consciousness? Will he be able to carry our existential grief like Seán Ó Ríordáin? And it took Ó Ríordáin at least twenty years to develop an all-embracing Irish vocabulary—and he was only stung into a purposeful, Dunquin-based learning of this by Máire Mhac an tSaoí’s stinging critique of his work. And will Hart-nett have a patient audience, an audience that will wait for his vocabulary? As patient as Theo Dorgan, for example, who thinks his decision is a marvel. Or has he merely committed an act of linguistic piety, thereby creating an imaginative dead-end like Daniel Corkery? Corkery’s embrace of the Gaelic League marked the end of his career as a serious artist. Middle-aged Irishmen often embrace “The Language” with the same hopeless abandon that certain English writers embrace Roman Catholicism—and their decision is defined not by what they’ve embraced but by what they think they’ve abandoned. AUGUST 15, 1974 In his Wintering Out Seamus Heaney breaks away from the mere material of Ireland like a greyhound out of a trap. He has found an impersonal personal voice and method, something beyond our national, conventional voices. His year in California has changed him, loosened him and enlarged him; though it does make him sound more like Ted Hughes: the Hughes of Wodwo and Crow. Heaney still hasn’t reached Hughes’ intensity or precision. The linguistic precision, the calculated emotional weight, in every phrase of Hughes is simply astonishing. There is still too much of pietistic Irish Catholicism and too little of hard Pen-nine granite in Heaney, but, still, he has his own material: he has Ireland, he has Ulster. Heaney is surely the poet of eels as Hughes is the poet of eagles. And, poetically, Hughes is Heaney’s great technical rival. I wonder is Hughes, over there in England and making a completely English life, aware of Heaney yet? Does he think of him with fear and contempt, the way Montague does? Or is he unaware of this powerful, unwavering Irishman, the way Lord Byron was unaware of the real power of Shelley? Can one poet ever really feel the force of another poet’s future? A poet can only imagine his own success, never another’s. The continuing resentment H. generates in Montague is so wild and intense. Pat Crotty and I have to be careful not to talk of Heaney when John is...

The Social Identity Change of Little Bee as the Main Character in Chris Cleave’s The Other Hand

<p><strong>This research examines Little Bee’s social identity change based on Chris Cleave’s novel entitled <em>the Other Hand. </em>The object of this research focuses on the Little Bee’s social identity change. The method used in this research is critical reading. To collect the data, the researcher did some steps including reading the novel closely and intensively, making notes, visiting library, and exploring the data from the internet which are related to the topic. In analyzing the data, the researcher used descriptive qualitative method.</strong></p><strong>After conducting the research, the researcher got several research findings. They are: 1). The reason of Little Bee’s social identity change are her envy towards British people’s easy life, her needs to tell her sad story, her will to survive, and her desire to overcome her past. 2). The way Little Bee learns her new identity is by reading, such as novels and newspaper, practicing how to pronounce and speak, looking for difficult words in her dictionary in order to learn the language, and learning the British life by watching television and reading books to understand the British lifestyle.</strong>

Legitimising Religion in Public

Abstract The English context for interreligious dialogue is shaped by the presence of an established church which is inclusive, geographically spread, and engages with the state. This article will trace the ways in which the presence of an established church, and the particular model of church-state settlement, provide a context to legitimise particular types of interreligious activity. The social role of religion, the representative function of religion, and religion as an inclusive category, will be highlighted as key elements in the role of religion in English public life and in how interreligious organisations have developed. This observation is analytically useful as it assists an understanding of how and why interreligious dialogue and other activity has at various points become significant for the state’s governance of religious diversity, how success is understood and managed, and what non-engagement with interreligious activity might indicate.

BBC Independence and Impartiality: The Case of the 1956 Suez Crisis

As the world’s oldest national broadcaster, The British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is unique in its contribution to British life and its level of international influence. The BBC is well known for its historic core mission (to inform, educate and entertain) and commitment to the principles of independence and impartiality. Yet the definition and practical application of these tenets are far from clear-cut. Considered by some to be a quasi-autonomous non-governmental organization, the BBC has been subjected to much criticism throughout its long history regarding its ability to resist State and corporate pressures. This article seeks to explore State pressures in the context of calls for national unity in times of crisis when tensions with the BBC are at their greatest. To this end, a qualitative analysis of the 1956 Suez Crisis is conducted and is linked to the decline of the British Empire. This study shows the limited interpretation of impartiality by the BBC at that time. Anthony Eden’s Conservative government fought a propaganda war at home and abroad in the build-up to military intervention. The BBC’s independence was ambiguous at best, although it emerged from the crisis with its reputation intact due to its insistence on the notion of impartiality.

‘Irish … but nothing Irish’: The performance of Ireland on the British colonial stage

In a perceptive essay on Scottish national and imperial identity, Richard J. Finlay framed what he termed the ‘transplantation of “Highlandism”’ to the colonies through Scottish societies, Highland dancing clubs and Burns nights as the ‘performance of Scotland’ overseas. Using a range of documentary archival sources and written and oral personal testimonies, this essay applies Finlay’s idea to Irish communalization in the twentieth-century British dependent empire. The transient ‘imperial Irish’ diasporas that Irish soldiers, settlers, colonial servants and missionaries comprised formed an integral and generally indiscernible part of the British ruling class. However, Irishness was spatialized in colonial life through Irish clubs, societies and St Patrick’s Day celebrations which enacted a ‘stage’ performance of Ireland based on ritualized caricature and trope. This performance was also thoroughly imperialized and was directed with performative purpose. It worked to ecumenize the social, religious and political ‘varieties of Irishness’ that co-existed in British colonial life; ‘imperial Irish’ diasporas represented the heterogeneity of twentieth-century Irish identities and these performances created depoliticized spaces which emphasized commonalities rather than contrasts. Inter-accommodation of these disconsonant identities was required in the colonies where ‘British’ ethnic, political and religious differences had to be submerged to preserve the more critical distinction between colonizer and colonized on which the empire’s legitimacy and sustainability depended. The colonial performance of Ireland also served to demonstrate that Irishness and loyalty to the Crown and empire were not, by definition, dichotomous: the non-threatening, imperialized image of Irishness that they presented countered the enduring trope of the Irish as ‘natural subversives’.

N for Nobody: An Academic Autobiography

In this article I have discussed Professor C.D. Narasimhaiah's N for Nobody as an academic autobiography, in which he has recorded his gradual growth from humble beginnings to the stature of an internationally recognized scholar, teacher and critic. I have highlighted how Professor CDN combined in himself the elements of merit and good luck in rising higher and higher in his academic life and how he did a great service to Indian Universities by introducing American Literature and Commonwealth Literatures thereby extending the vista of Indian academic learning from the parochial British Literature to the international Commonwealth Literature. Likewise I have discussed how he made use of his academic contact with the famous scholars of Britain, America and Australia among others both in teaching and learning new disciplines. I have also shown how his autobiographical writing is intertwined with his critical appreciation of the modern literary giants and how he being a member of several research bodies like ASRC and others helped several young scholars to get Fulbright fellowships to study in the US, a fact which holds mirror to his enormous encouragement to the younger scholars of India. I have highlighted how his academic dream has been realized in his establishment of a research centre like Dhvanyaloka, which is equal to ASRC in quality, if not in quantity and which acts a source of information and inspiration to young Indian scholars to pursue their research. I have also shown how he did not care and condescend to become a Vice-Chancellor of any Indian University (unlike many empty-headed professors), which is a political appointment rather than an academic one and stayed miles away from the dirty politicians due to his pure academic pursuits. Finally I have shown the vices of his virtue in not recording the cultural details of British and American life in his autobiography, unlike other contemporaries like Dr. K.Iswaran.

Towards a pluralistic understanding of Chinese homeowners: the case of ‘ordinary’ buyers

In this paper we address ‘ordinary’ Chinese buyers in London’s residential real estate market. We argue that current academic and policy analysis, particularly of elites, has focused on the higher-end of the market and over-emphasised the detached nature of international buyers. In contrast, building on, but departing from, existing analyses of the multiple classes of Chinese investors evident in London (see Glucksberg, 2016), we reveal the tactics and motivations of buyers with budgets of less than £500,000. We show that they are motivated by good schools, easy commutes and use similar technologies to mediate and understand the market to local buyers. Such aims and approaches, we argue, show the ordinariness of many Chinese buyers. Underpinning their aims is an aspirational, class-defined desire based on making sacrifices so their children can have a ‘normal British life’. This becomes an elective belonging, as they integrate into the norms of London’s housing market. In demonstrating how the realities of ordinary buyers contrasts with existing narratives of Chinese investors, we highlight plurality of experiences, strategies and aims of Chinese people buying homes. We argue such an understanding forces us to rethink the form and character of Chinese investment practices in western cities by de-centring London’s prime areas and purchasers when analysing property acquisition’s internationalisation. In turn this evidences the false binary of local and international demand and shows the complexities hidden behind narratives of international capital.

Making up the British countryside: A posthuman critique of Country Life's narratives of rural resilience and conservation

Through a close reading of a 2018 special issue of the popular British magazine Country Life guest edited by Prince Charles, this paper highlights the tension between its stated inclusive view of the rural and the exclusionary paternalistic-conservative politics pursued under this veneer. Combining a narratological method with a posthuman perspective grounded in the recent work of Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, which undoes binary oppositions such as nature-culture and rural-urban by radically reconfiguring notions of agency, difference, and responsibility, we ask: who and what makes up ‘country life’ in the stories presented in the special issue, who and what gets to tell these stories, and which human and non-human actors are marginalised or left out by how the stories are told? Our analysis, which focuses on the special issue's engagement with notions of rural resilience and conservation, advances debates in rural studies about how to challenge non-inclusive narratives of the rural by: 1) highlighting the continued urgency of critiquing such narratives, especially when they appear in popular outlets like Country Life ; 2) drawing attention to the way these narratives may be implicitly rather than explicitly exclusionary, which indicates a need to pay close attention to exactly how their politics of the rural is constructed; and 3) proposing that more intensive engagement with Barad and Haraway can advance the work of rural studies scholars who have long sought to think the rural as more-than-human. • Analyses the politics of the rural in an issue of Country Life guest edited by Prince Charles from a posthuman perspective. • Shows how the issue's paternalist-conservative view on rural resilience and conservation belies its claim to inclusivity. • Draws attention to the way popular narratives of the rural may be implicitly rather than explicitly exclusionary • Builds on ongoing discussions in rural studies about how to establish more inclusive accounts of the rural • Advances the thinking of the rural as more-than-human through the recent work of Karen Barad and Donna Haraway.

Synonyms and Lexical Substitutions in Texts of the Old English Life of Saint Mary of Egypt

ABSTRACT Among the unusually high number of variants in the three surviving texts of the Old English Life of Saint Mary of Egypt are many instances in which a scribe has changed an inherited reading by substituting one word for another. Many of the substitutions are the result of error or unconscious scribal preference but this article demonstrates that all three texts of the Old English Life, which is of likely Anglian origin, also reveal a pattern of deliberate rewording. This rewording arises from a desire to regularise and “improve” the language of the Life, bringing it more into line with the norms of Late West Saxon, the literary language generally in use in the period when our scribes were at work. No such pattern of substitution is evident in other hagiographical texts in the same manuscripts. The Life of Saint Mary of Egypt was clearly viewed by compilers of late Anglo-Saxon hagiographical manuscripts as a work worthy of inclusion but, unlike other lives, as one in need of some linguistic revision to make it fit in with accepted literary standards.

Nick Hubble, Jennie Taylor, and Philip Tew , eds. Growing Old with the Welfare State: Eight British Lives. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Pp. 176. $88.00 (cloth).

Nick Hubble, Jennie Taylor, and Philip Tew <scp>,</scp> eds. Growing Old with the Welfare State: Eight British Lives. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Pp. 176. $88.00 (cloth).

One British Thing: The Safety Razor

AbstractThis essay examines the history of the safety razor in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Britain. In so doing, it explores male shaving practices and the male investment in physical appearance in the age of industrial capitalism. In highlighting the history of a single material artifact to showcase the relationship between masculinity, good grooming, personal success, and notions of self-improvement, this essay also underscores the growing influence of American products in British life, the intricacies of the consumer economy, and the increasing sophistication of advertising practices.

British national identity and life satisfaction in ethnic minorities in the United Kingdom

ABSTRACT This study examines British national identification in survey data from 226 Indians, Pakistanis, Black Caribbeans and Black Africans. Black participants reported stronger ethnic identification and more frequent ethnic discrimination; and Pakistanis reported higher religiosity and more frequent religious discrimination, but stronger British national identification. Uncertainty about the meaning and accessibility of British national identity and perceived ethnic discrimination were associated with decreased British national identification. British national identification was in turn positively associated with life satisfaction. Uncertainty about the meaning and significance of Britishness challenges its value to overall identity maintenance, making it less accessible to ethnic minorities.