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This book explores how literary texts envision England and respond to discourses and conceptions of Englishness and the English nation, especially in relation to gender and language. The essays discuss texts from the fifteenth to the twentieth century and bear witness to changing views of England and the English, highlighting the importance of religion, economy, landscape, the spectre of the "other" and language in this discourse. The volume pays attention to women writers' reflection on the nation and the roles female figures play in male writers' visions of nationhood. It brings into conversation less well-known voices like those of Osbern Bokenham, Thomas Deloney, Eleanor Davies and Jacquetta Hawkes with canonical authors-William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf-and opens a space for exploring the interplay of dominant and variant voices in the fashioning of England.
List of contents
1. Introduction: Rahel Orgis and Matthias Heim.- 2. Engendering a sense of Englishness: The Use of the Mother Tongue in Osbern Bokenham's "Vita Sanctae Margaretae": Katrin Rupp.- 3. Tricking Sir George into Marriage: The Utopian Moral Reform of the English Commonwealth in Thomas Deloney's Jack of Newbury: Rahel Orgis.- 4. Shakespeare's Style, Shakespeare's England: Hugh Craig.- 5. Gendering the Archipelago: Nation, State and Empire in the Prophetic Writings of Lady Eleanor Davies: Christopher Ivic and Willy Maley.- 6. By Deeds of Stealth: English Books Abroad in the Mid-Eighteenth Century: Allen Reddick.- 7. Sons of Nature: The Bourgeois Pursuit of Happiness in the Swiss Alps and Wordsworth's Lake District: Patrick Vincent.- 8. Wordsworth UnEnglished: Rachel Falconer.- 9. "To be a true citizen of Highbury": Language and National Identity in Jane Austen's Emma (1816): Anne-Claire Michoux.- 10. Renegotiating Home and Away in Virginia Woolf's The Voyage Out: Suzana Zink.- 11. English Visions: The Work of Jacquetta Hawkes Priestly: Ina Habermann.- 12. Olivier's Technicolor England: Capturing the Nation through the Battlefields of Henry V (1944) and Richard III (1955).
About the author
Rahel Orgis is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. She is the author of Narrative Structure and Reader Formation in Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania (2017) and has published articles on early modern prose fiction and drama in the Sidney Journal, SPELL and ELR.
Matthias Heimworks as digital publications manager for hep publishing in Berne, Switzerland. He has undertaken research on the space of war in early modern plays and investigated Shakespeare’s low-frequency vocabulary through computer-aided statistics at the University of Neuchâtel. Currently he explores how battlefield images in cinema shape modern readings of battles in Shakespeare’s plays.
Summary
This book explores how literary texts envision England and respond to discourses and conceptions of Englishness and the English nation, especially in relation to gender and language. The essays discuss texts from the fifteenth to the twentieth century and bear witness to changing views of England and the English, highlighting the importance of religion, economy, landscape, the spectre of the “other” and language in this discourse. The volume pays attention to women writers’ reflection on the nation and the roles female figures play in male writers’ visions of nationhood. It brings into conversation less well-known voices like those of Osbern Bokenham, Thomas Deloney, Eleanor Davies and Jacquetta Hawkes with canonical authors—William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf—and opens a space for exploring the interplay of dominant and variant voices in the fashioning of England.
