The politics of Englishness

The politics of Englishness provides a digest of the debates about England and Englishness and a unique perspective on those debates. Not only does the book provide readers with ready access to and interpretation of the significant literature on ‘The English Question’, it also enables them to make sense of the political, historical and cultural factors which constitute that question.

The book addresses the condition of England in three interrelated parts. The first looks at traditional narratives of the English polity and reads them as legends of political Englishness, of England as the exemplary exception, exceptional in its constitutional tradition and exemplary in its political stability. The second considers how the decay of that legend has encouraged anxieties about English political identity, of how English identity can be recognized within the new complexity of British governance. The third revisits these legends and anxieties, examining them in terms of the actual and metaphorical ‘locations’ of Englishness: regionalism, Europeanism and Britishness.

Contents

1. Put out more flags
Part I: Legends of Englishness
2. An absorptive patria
3. The English idiom
4. Dead centre of inertia
Part II: Anxieties of Englishness
5. English before they were British
6. England.co.uk
7. Slow alchemy of centuries
Part III: Locations of Englishness
8. Region: resources of identity
9. Europe: a necessary context
10. England: a British relationship
11. Put out even more flags