Product Description: Ideas of Englishness, and of the English nation, have become a matter of renewed interest in recent years as a result of threats to the integrity of the United Kingdom and the perceived rise of that unusual thing, English nationalism...read more

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 variations of a legend 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 and about how English identity can be recognised within the new complexity of British governance. The third revisits these narratives and anxieties, examining them in terms of actual and metaphorical 'locations' of Englishness: the regional, the European and the British.

Product Description: Historians of the long eighteenth century have recently recognised that this period is central both to the history of cultural production and consumption and to the history of national and regional identity. Yet no book has, as yet, directly engaged with these two areas of interest at the same time...read more

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Between 1650 and 1850 perceptions of the English were transformed, as a nation of supposed barbarians, fanatics, and king-killers evolved into a world power of political maturity, imperial grandeur, and industrial might. Englishness Identified traces the evolution of the so-called English national character through the impressions and analyses of foreign observers, and relates it to English ambitions and anxieties during a period of rapid change. (view table of contents)

An historical exploration of the myths, legends, and events that have shaped the English identity examines the tales surrounding King Arthur, Robin Hood, and Alfred the Great to offer insights about the roots of English culture. (view table of contents)

Product Description: This book sets out to explore the quality of Englishness that distinguishes the people, not only from the rest of Europe, but also from their closer neighbours in Wales, Scotland and Ireland. It is not another comprehensive history of the English-speaking people but the story of the development of English culture and personality from the Anglo-Saxon invasion to the Industrial Revolution...read more