Conclusion
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 September 2012
Summary
That a book about English popular culture ends by the tomb of a princess on an artificial island in the grounds of a South Midlands stately home might seem to confirm that, at the end of the twentieth century, Englishness still occupied traditional ground defined by archaic hierarchies of social station and myths of rural settlement. The case of England ten years later is no less contradictory, with plenty of evidence for a persistent popular interest in the question of nationhood, but a banal range of resources to satisfy that interest. Studying Englishness can still be quite embarrassing. This is, in part at least, a result of the way in which the English question continues to be framed. Ever since the time of Cecil Sharp, the ‘revival’ of England has been couched in terms of nationalism, reconstruction and recovery, all cultural and political processes that England had previously and notably avoided. Instead of inventing its own nation, as the rules of nationalism demand, England had invented entirely different national and colonial structures to stand in for it. One of the reasons that the St George flag will always be tainted with its association with the Far Right is that it never had any previous existence as a popular collective symbol. The English were quite content to be British and allow the national question to slide between those two slippery near-synonyms.
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- Information
- EnglishnessTwentieth-Century Popular Culture and the Forming of English Identity, pp. 178 - 182Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2008