The idea of English ethnicity / Robert J.C. Young.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Young, Robert, 1950-

Series:

Blackwell manifestos

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

National characteristics, English.

Ethnology--Great Britain.

Ethnology.

Group identity.

Great Britain.

Group identity--Great Britain.

Great Britain--Civilization.

Civilization.

Physical Description:

xiii, 291 pages : illustrations, maps ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Malden, MA : Blackwell Pub., 2008.

Summary:

In recent years, particularly since devolution in the UK, there have been many attempts to identify what exactly Englishness really involves. In this major contribution to debates about English identity, leading cultural theorist Robert J. C. Young argues that the recent uncertainty about the nature of the English arises from more than just the challenges of devolution, or even the end of empire. It is rather the long-term result of the fact that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Englishness was never really about England, the place, its essence, or its national character, at all. It was rather developed as a form of ethnic identity for those who were precisely not English, but rather made up the English diaspora around the world, Americans, Canadians, Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans.

Englishness was constructed as a translatable quality or identity that could be taken on or appropriated by anyone anywhere - which is why the most English Englishmen have rarely been English. This construction was so powerful that even today the English diaspora continues to act together at a political level around the globe. In England itself, this meant that being English was characterized through an open structure of inclusion rather than exclusion, which helps to explain why the country has been able to transform itself into one of the most successful of modern multicultural nations.

Contents:

Introduction: exodus

Saxonism

'New theory of race: Saxon v. Celt'

Moral and philosophical anatomy

The Times and its Celtic challengers

Matthew Arnold's critique of 'Englishism'

'A vaster England': the Anglo-Saxon

'England round the world'

Englishness: England and nowhere.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 242-274) and index.

ISBN:

9781405101288

1405101288

9781405101295

1405101296

OCLC:

85485143

Online:

Contributor biographical information

Publisher description