British National Identity Research Articles

‘They think it’s all Dover!’ Popular newspaper narratives and images about the English football team and (re)presentations of national identity during Euro 2012

The 2012 UEFA European Football Championship (‘Euro 2012’) – Europe’s quadrennial football bonanza was held in Poland and the Ukraine between June 8th and July 1st. Occurring between Elizabeth II’s Diamond jubilee and the London 2012 Olympic Games, the eyes of the media were fixated on the pride and joy of English football, its men’s national team. With national consciousness at an all-time high, articles in England’s tabloid, ‘red-top,’ daily national newspapers The Sun and Daily Mirror were tracked for three weeks as they lavished their attentions on the national pastime. Their coverage of the English team reflected a heightened consciousness of English national identity. Drawing on Guibernau’s strategies for creating and uniting citizens around a collective national identity, this study examined how England’s popular media presented and represented England’s national identity to reflect the real and imagined versions of Englishness during this major sporting event.1 By focusing on The Sun and Daily Mirror’s narratives about, and images of, the English team during the Euro 2012 tournament, this paper focuses on how English national identity ebbed and flowed during a time of seismic change within the country. Shaped by an inductive textual analysis, this paper shows how the press fluctuated between optimistic notions of the present and future English national identity and traditional ‘olde England’ in an almost formulaic fashion.

Remembering the Catholic Middle Ages: The Franciscans, English National Identity, and William Hogarth’s The Roast Beef of Old England

Remembering the Catholic Middle AgesThe Franciscans, English National Identity, and William Hogarth’s The Roast Beef of Old England David Salter (bio) Introduction: An Eighteenth-Century Ecumenical Encounter At the very beginning of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768), we are presented with a highly emblematic encounter between the novel’s fictional protagonist, the Anglican clergyman, Parson Yorick, and a Franciscan friar, who we subsequently discover is called Father Lorenzo. By the time of the novel’s publication, Parson Yorick was already well known to the reading public through his earlier appearances as the affable provincial Minister in Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67), and in A Sentimental Journey the author was able to exploit Yorick’s existing popularity, along with the contemporary vogue for both travel writing and “sentimental” fiction, with an account of the parson’s tour of France. (Although it would appear that he had originally intended to include a description of Yorick’s subsequent journey to Italy, Sterne’s chronic illness at the time of writing, and his subsequent death a mere month after the novel’s publication, prevented him from completing his original plan.) As we might expect from the author of [End Page 99] Click for larger view View full resolution William Hogarth, O The Roast Beef of Old England (The Gate of Calais), 1748. Photo credit: Art Resource, NY. [End Page 100] the experimental Tristram Shandy, Sterne offers an extremely unconventional travel narrative that is almost entirely lacking in those elements normally to be found in the genre, such as descriptions of historical sites, artistic treasures, landscape and topography, and so on. Rather, the narrative consists of a set of introspective reflections recounted by Yorick of how he is emotionally and morally affected by the experience of foreign travel, and in particular by foreigners and their unfamiliar habits and customs. It is as a commentary on the English experience of traveling abroad—of confronting the unfamiliar “otherness” of foreigners—that we are invited to read the encounter with the Franciscan, which comes at the very start of Yorick’s journey, on the day of his arrival in Calais. Father Lorenzo, whom the narrative first identifies as “a poor monk of the order of St. Francis” approaches Yorick in his Calais lodgings soliciting alms “for his convent.”1 Yorick evidently finds the situation deeply disconcerting: like many eighteenth-century English Protestants, he is affronted by the Franciscan practice of mendicancy—of begging—and is determined not to give the friar “a single sous.”2 However, on dismissing Father Lorenzo in a rather haughty and peremptory manner, saying that there are many people much more deserving of his charity, Yorick immediately regrets his actions. Observing how the friar accepts the rejection with equanimity and good grace, Yorick reproaches himself not so much for his lack of charity, as for the high-handed way in which he acted, and the want of empathy and fellow feeling it reveals. At the outset of his journey, then, in what is almost his very first encounter with a foreigner, Yorick acknowledges his own inability to make the imaginative leap necessary to understand and sympathetically enter into the world of the Franciscan friar. In the language of the novel, he has failed the test of the “Sentimental Traveller,”3 but, recognizing his own shortcomings, he endeavors to do better in the future: “I have behaved very ill; said I within myself; but I have only just set out upon my travels; and shall learn better manners as I get along.”4 And he is almost immediately offered the opportunity to put his good intentions into [End Page 101] effect when he once again meets up with the Franciscan, this time in the street, and their second encounter ends much more happily with an exchange of gifts, which cements their newly acquired friendship and mutual respect. What we see in this brief vignette is something both highly conventional and deeply idiosyncratic. In his initial display of unkindness to Father Lorenzo, Yorick gives expression to the distrust and hostility that was so characteristic of eighteenth-century English attitudes toward continental Catholicism (sentiments that Yorick had...

Reforming the Mystical Body: From Mass to Martyr in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments

While John Foxe’s sixteenth-century work Acts and Monuments is recognized as a foundational text for emergent English national identity, I argue that this document of historical progress actually recapitulates rather than discards earlier religious traditions. Acts and Monuments renovates the social and sacramental concept of corpus mysticum , inherited from the Middle Ages, in Protestant martyrological terms. Both textually and visually, Foxe’s work displaces sacramental theology from Eucharistic celebration to martyrological narrative, producing a reformed English corpus mysticum . This argument reveals how the Tudor political theology of the mystical body perpetuated a communitarian tradition formerly associated with the Catholic Mass.

The construction of British national identity among British South Asians

This paper explores the social psychological aspects of British national identification among British South Asians, which constitutes the largest ethnic minority group in Britain. Identity process theory can elucidate the social and psychological ‘functions’ of Britishness for social actors, offering a holistic account of national identification within this population. The paper provides a discussion of nationhood and the construction of national identity, temporal factors in national identification, its cognitive and affective aspects, the psychological ‘functionality’ of Britishness, and its social representations. It is argued that a civic, instrumental conception of Britishness might facilitate access to this identity among British South Asians.

Recasting England: The Varieties of Antiquarian Responses to the Proposed Union of Crowns, 1603–1607

In 1604, the Elizabethan Society of Antiquaries examined three components of King James’s proposed Anglo-Scottish union: the unity of name, law, and Parliament. As members of the Society reconstructed English history in their papers, a variety of historical and constitutional positions emerged concerning English institutions and national identity. This article argues that these various renderings of English ancient constitutionalism reveal a protean and heightened sense of England’s juridical past. It contextualizes these divergent narratives in the identity crisis engendered by the proposed Anglo-Scottish union and gives special attention to those antiquaries who saw the law and Parliament as a more recent and complicated development. In doing so, these antiquaries portrayed a constitution that was neither ancient nor immutable, but rather one that was constructed from a mishmash of foreign customs. By analyzing the antiquaries’ arguments, this article seeks to broaden the historiographical understanding of ancient constitutionalism and to show that the antiquaries made a significant contribution to early Stuart political thought.

Post-imperial Drama: History, Memory and Narrative in Peter Kosminsky's The Promise

Historical television drama enjoys a privileged place in the mediation of collective, national memory as it imaginatively transports viewers from their living rooms to the time/place of earlier events. It may contest existing narratives of the nation and challenge viewers to re-think the stories told of how we arrived at the current moment. This article addresses these questions of memory and national histories through analysis of Peter Kosminsky's four-part series, The Promise (Channel 4, 2011). It tells the ‘untold’ story of the British in postwar Palestine. It comprises two parallel stories of Len Matthews, a paratrooper deployed in 1945 to Palestine, and his granddaughter, Erin, who, in the present, visits Israel whilst reading Len's diary. Through these characters, the complex, conflictual histories of the British in Palestine and the aftermath of imperial powers in the region are dramatically played out. This article approaches The Promise as post-imperial drama, that is, as a fiction based on the contested, half-forgotten, sometimes denied facts of British imperialism, and one which seeks to intervene in such post-imperial amnesia. In doing so, the article contributes to debates around British national identities and the imaginative representation of history on British television.

The Rise and Fall of Meter: Poetry and English National Culture, 1860–1930 by Meredith Martin (review)

Reviewed by: The Rise and Fall of Meter: Poetry and English National Culture, 1860–1930 by Meredith Martin Michael D. Hurley (bio) The Rise and Fall of Meter: Poetry and English National Culture, 1860–1930 by Meredith Martin; pp. 288. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton UP, 2012. $39.10 paper. Few books promise to rewrite literary history, but The Rise and Fall of Meter is one of them. Boldly and brilliantly, Martin argues that the familiar story of how Modernism developed out of Victorianism—the story typically rehearsed in our literary-historical surveys—is misleading. Ezra Pound boasted that he and his peers broke the pentameter and, with it, the stultifying stranglehold of Victorian prosodic propriety. Martin turns this tale on its head: she contends that Modernist poetics do not so much indicate reactionism and rupture as they do continuity. For the prosodic theory and practice of the nineteenth century is not, on inspection, one of established order after all. It is actually one of restless and radical experimentation. And even into the Modernist moment, it is not only the self-styled avant-garde who seek to challenge the consolidated concept of traditional metres: that challenge comes also from poets who had been expanding the concept of English metre throughout the nineteenth century. In Martin’s account, even that most formally daring and difficult of late nineteenth-century poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins, is not (as I.A. Richards would describe him) a “proto-Modernist” (49): he is a prototypical Victorian. His verse is noteworthy not because it was exceptional in its time but rather because it is exemplary of it. (Martin is especially original here on Hopkins’s use of diacritical marks in his poems.) [End Page 221] Joseph Phelan’s The Music of Verse: Metrical Experiment in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (2012) was published too late for Martin to take account of it, but he argues in the same revisionist direction—though his book complements rather than anticipates Martin’s thesis. Phelan’s focus is on the innovative practices of nineteenth-century prosody. He aims to correct the erroneous view of nineteenth-century poetry as a steady progress from the conservative bonds of formal strictness towards the imaginative liberty of the “New Prosody” and “free verse.” But while Phelan is thus concerned with metre as an artisanal measure of English versification, Martin is interested in reflecting on what—variously and contrarily, explicitly and implicitly—“English” and “metre” might have meant at the time. Looking to Robert Bridges in particular as an instructive and influential figure in the “prosody wars” of the period, The Rise and Fall of Meter investigates “metre” as a dynamic concept responding to the diverse and competing pressures of English history and national identity. These include “class mobility, imperialism, masculinity, labour, education, the role of classical and philological institutions, freedom, patriotism, national identification, and high versus low art” (4). To notice that The Rise and Fall of Meter is less focused on prosodic practice than it is on the discussions of prosody is not, however, to imply that the book is trained on politics and culture to the exclusion of aesthetics. On the contrary, following Isobel Armstrong’s seminal study Victorian Poetry Now (1993), as well as a raft of more recent works on historical prosody (notably, by Wolfson and Prins), Martin is indeed consciously preoccupied with exploring the extent to which these categories interpenetrate. Martin quite sensibly shies from attempting to engage with all possible ramifying significances of the period’s prosodic discourses (although the subtitle of The Rise and Fall of Meter suggests that its purview extends from 1860 to 1930, the argument in fact reaches as far back as the late eighteenth century). But the coverage Martin does offer—presented as three interconnected and concurrent narratives—is extensive and subtle. The first of these narratives concerns the idea that the study of English literature, and of English prosody in particular, might act as a civilizing force: at home, for the newly enfranchised English masses, and abroad, within the empire. The second narrative traces the way that concepts of “native” or “foreign” and “inside” or “outside” are written and rewritten into the various attempts to establish...

The Invention of a Hero: Lajos Kossuth in England (1851)

The creation, propagation and mythologization of heroes, or rather, the images of heroes, have recently attracted a good deal of attention from historians. This article aims to contribute to this discussion through a study of the cult of the Hungarian independence leader Lajos Kossuth and his reception in Britain in 1851. Why was a Hungarian national hero so widely celebrated in far away England and how was Kossuth’s heroic image created? While historical research has not completely overlooked the subject, little attention has been paid to Kossuth’s own part and perhaps even more importantly, that of his representative in England prior to his arrival, Ferenc Pulszky, in these events. As this article will argue, Kossuth’s image was in fact purposefully manufactured by these two men and others. The role of Pulszky, Kossuth’s back‐stage manager cannot be overstressed; without him Kossuth might have remained an obscure Central European revolutionary leader. During the two years prior to the Magyar leader’s arrival, the ground was being carefully prepared for him, so that when Kossuth arrived, all he was required to do was employ his uniquely powerful oratory and continue to equate the Hungarian movement with certain universal values, a process that had already been set in motion by Pulszky. But specific Englishmen were also instrumental in the creation of Kossuth’s hero cult. A small group of liberal intellectuals and middle‐class radicals, including Lord Dudley Stuart and Richard Cobden amongst others, eagerly engaged in first helping Pulszky popularize the Hungarian question and then coaching Kossuth by giving advice on maintaining his heroic appeal. Thus it was a multi‐sided affair – the joint Hungarian duo of Pulszky and Kossuth and their English ‘sympathizers’ were all creators of Kossuth’s hero cult in England. But we must not forget that the adulation of Kossuth in 1851 was also down to more abstract notions: the receptiveness of contemporary English minds to the celebration of heroes and the importance attached to English national identity, with which the Kossuth cult was deeply intertwined in the eyes of all those Englishmen that celebrated him.

‘Harry walks, Fabio runs’: A case study on the current relationship between English national identity, soccer and the English press

On 8 February 2012 Fabio Capello resigned from his position as manager of the England men’s national association football (soccer) team. The date this decision became public coincided with the acquittal in court of Harry Redknapp following the Tottenham Hotspur FC manager being accused of tax evasion. As Redknapp was considered the media favourite to succeed Capello as England manager, press coverage of these two events proved an interesting case through which to explore the current relationship between English national identity, soccer and the English national press. As such, this paper is concerned with how the events of that day were reported by nine different English national newspapers across 82 pages of coverage. Thematic analysis revealed that journalists often adopted a ‘Little Englander’ mentality with regards to their attitudes towards Capello, due to his Italian nationality. Contrary to this, the press frequently depicted Redknapp as a typically ‘English’ working-class hero linking him with nostalgic references to a bygone ‘golden era’ of English soccer. These findings illustrate the main ways in which the English press continue to present English national identity via their soccer-related coverage as insular and rooted in the past.

What is British national identity and how do we get it?

What is British national identity and how do we get it?

Plane Spotting, Military Portraiture, and Multiculturalism in the Imperial War Museum

The 2008 Imperial War Museum exhibition “From War to Windrush” was intended to “commemorate the contribution of Black men and women from the Caribbean and Britain during the First and Second World Wars.” Freeing the imaginary of the Second World War from its conjunction with an exclusionary “white” British or English national identity is no small undertaking; in fact, as Paul Gilroy suggests, nostalgia for Second World War imagery often functions to obscure the memory of the colonial past. “From War to Windrush” challenged the naturalized associations between notions of “heritage,” nostalgic affect, and an exclusively “white” memory of the Second World War. It achieved this by borrowing the memorializing and nationalistic form of the military portrait, altering portraits of black servicemen and servicewomen made within other photographic genres to conform to the national dimensions of this recognizable form. Through this form, the exhibition therefore reproduced the structural tension inherent in multicultural national identity: that between the conflicting need to understand the nation, in Homi Bhabha's words, as both “the event of the everyday and the advent of the epochal.”

The Party Politics of Englishness

Research Highlights and Abstract provides one of the first assessments of how British multi-national and English political parties have responded to existing and emergent identity tensions in England whilst continuing to defend the concept of the post-devolution British union-state. extends debates about multi-level party political systems in multi-national states which have typically focused on Scotland, Wales and, to a lesser extent, Northern Ireland. considers the potential that debates about English national identity could morph into a party politics of Englishness. assesses the potential for nascent English nationalism to encourage divergent party political responses to questions of English governance, citizenship and nation identity. This article assesses how the main British multi-national parties, whilst retaining an attachment of one form or another to the concept of the Union-state, have responded to existing and emergent identity tensions. Through examination of Labour, the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, with brief discussion of the BNP, UKIP and the English Democrats, it will consider the impact of devolution and the threat of separatist nationalism on party approaches and policy choices concerning English identity construction and governance. It will also explore the extent to which devolution has compromised the ability of UK politicians to ‘speak of Britain’ (they rarely use the term UK) and the four composite nations. By comparing and contrasting the narratives articulated by parties at different levels of governance it will ask whether a nascent ‘party politics of Englishness’ has emerged which can accommodate these challenges.

Figuring Freddie: Andrew Flintoff, the Ashes and English national identity

This article examines the media portrayal of Flintoff during that 2009 Ashes series. The paper argues that sport provides contemporary societies with the celebrities which best represent national identities and attributes. Amongst sports, cricket provides the archetypal representation of Englishness, and amongst cricketing events a home series against Australia provides the most meaningful contests and the most acute illustration of cricketing identities. In 2009, Flintoff and the Ashes therefore coincided to produce a particularly useful lens to view English national identity and thus the article focuses on three media narratives that became prominent in the summer of 2009: the interdependence of Flintoff and the Ashes, the relationship between Flintoff and English national identity and the relationship between the media's identification of Flintoff's character traits and contemporary conceptions of English national identity. The conclusion notes that Flintoff was constructed as a composite celebrity, combining notions of rural nostalgia with more modern passionate, carnivalesque Englishness. The study therefore elaborates on the connection between Englishness and cricket, details the characteristics of Englishness emphasized by the contemporary press and, ultimately, argues that the convergence of these narratives upon an individual celebrity – Flintoff – has specific consequences for contemporary society.

National Curriculum History Working Group: Final Report; The British Isles: A History of Four Nations, by Hugh Kearney; Britain: A Plural Society. Report of a Seminar; Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity, edited by Raphael Samuel, 3 vols; Games with Shadows, by Neal Ascherson; The Enchanted Glass: Britain and its Monarchy, by Tom Nairn; The Divided Kingdom,

<i>National Curriculum History Working Group: Final Report</i>; <i>The British Isles: A History of Four Nations</i>, by Hugh Kearney; <i>Britain: A Plural Society. Report of a Seminar</i>; <i>Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity</i>, edited by Raphael Samuel, 3 vols; <i>Games with Shadows</i>, by Neal Ascherson; <i>The Enchanted Glass: Britain and its Monarchy</i>, by Tom Nairn; <i>The Divided Kingdom</i>,

White like them: Whiteness and anachronistic space in representations of the English white working class

Themes of whiteness have informed many recent discussions of English national identity, yet the whiteness in question is attached to some groups but not others. In particular, whiteness is emblematically attached to members of the white working class, so that the whiteness of the middle classes becomes obscured. This paper is concerned with representations of white working-class people in the context of recent media and other discussions of English national identity. Hence, it is concerned not with the actions or sentiments of working-class people themselves, but with their positioning (by middle-class commentators) within an economy of cultural meaning around definitions of nation, multiculturalism and identity. Using press discussion of the BBC’s ‘White Season’ as a framing device, I argue that whiteness has come to be a signifier of white working-class existence. In this context, ‘white’ has shifted its meaning from something normal, normative and unmarked – Dyer’s ‘ordinary whiteness/whiteness as ordinary’ – to a marked – and markedly problematic – category that is applied only to some white people, who become bearers of ‘extreme whiteness’. This marking is linked with a positioning in the past, so that white working-class people can be marked as inhabiting ‘anachronistic space’.

Englishness as class: A re-examination

This paper considers the significance of class to English national identity. It takes one systematic exposition of the argument that Englishness has been traditionally and intimately bound up with class: George Schopflin’s essay Englishness: citizenship, ethnicity and class, published in 2000. Schopflin thought that Englishness was distinctive in European terms by its class rather than its ethnic character and that this provided people with a very secure and very stable identity, though he did observe a more ethnicised form of identity emerging at the beginning of the new millennium. This is a strong definition of Englishness as class and the paper reassesses its claims in terms of recent research on identity. It argues for a more nuanced understanding of the role of class but suggests that the modus vivendi of English class relations still distinguishes its identity within Europe and the United Kingdom.

For the People's Good: Hans Schleger (1898–1976), Poster Design and British National Identity, 1935–60

This essay explores the impact on British visual culture during the period c. 1935–47 of modernist graphic designer Hans Schleger (1898–1976), born Hans Schlesinger, who adopted the pseudonym ‘Zero’ in the mid-1920s. Comment is offered on the complex nature of Schleger's German-Jewish-Polish background and his Anglophilia, which can be dated to a period he spent working in advertising in New York (1924–9). Attention is focused on the accomplished design work he produced after he emigrated to Britain in 1932 for British companies and institutions such as Shell-Mex BP Ltd, the London Passenger Transport Board (London Underground), the General Post Office, the Ministry of Transport, Ministry of Food, ICI, British Coal, the British Sugar Corporation and British Railways. Particular comment is made on the importance to the artist of the British and especially the English countryside of the Home Counties and the significance of his experiences in London during the Second World War in moulding his understanding of what he found attractive, admirable and praiseworthy about the British ‘character’ under duress. The essay concludes that it was Schleger's very ‘foreign-ness’, however skilfully camouflaged, which allowed him to study the British with an unusually forensic and revealing gaze. Since the publication in 2001 of a memoir on him by his widow, Schleger's work has featured prominently in a series of high-profile exhibitions held at: the Imperial War Museum, London; the Victoria and Albert Museum; the London Transport Museum; the Ben Uri Gallery, the London Jewish Museum of Art.

Performing Imperial Masculinity in British Theatre in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on theatrical representations of India in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, with special reference to two stage productions, Ramah Droog (1798) and The Cataract of the Ganges (1823). It argues that whilst the plays may have intended to deploy India as a space upon which to outline a militaristic British national identity and bourgeois gender norms, they in fact reflected contemporary anxieties about the fragility of British imperial masculinity. Moreover, it proposes that though theatre directors sought to impress upon audiences a sense of imperial dominance over the subcontinent through the deployment of visual technologies, such attempts were not wholly successful, with spectators having the capacity to deconstruct the façade that lay before their eyes.

Debating the Slave Trade: Rhetoric of British National Identity, 1759‐1815 – By Srividhya Swaminathan

Debating the Slave Trade: Rhetoric of British National Identity, 1759‐1815 – By Srividhya Swaminathan

Michael Tomko, British Romanticism and the Catholic Question: Religion, History and National Identity, 1778–1829, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. xi + 224, £52.50, ISBN: 978-0-230-27951-3.

Michael Tomko, British Romanticism and the Catholic Question: Religion, History and National Identity, 1778–1829, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. xi + 224, £52.50, ISBN: 978-0-230-27951-3. - Volume 31 Issue 1