Antony Easthope (1939–1999)

Today "nation" is probably the strongest of all forms of group identity. Over and above its expression in symbols such as flags, leaders, and cultural icons, national identity also works at a less visible, more insidious level--in the forms of discourse specific to a nation.

In this compelling study, Antony Easthope takes "Englishness" as an example and argues that this national identity is deeply informed by the empiricist tradition. He employs a wide array of examples from high and popular culture, ranging from philosophical and literary works through popular journalism and aspects of the English sense of humor. Englishness and National Culture asserts a profound continuity running from the seventeenth century until now. Today's journalists, novelists and politicians may imagine they are speaking for themselves, yet Easthope demonstrates the "ancestral voices" speaking through them.

Easthope breathes new life into what easily could have become another walk-through of the culture wars. This book is a stimulating and valuable contribution to investigations of Englishness. Easthope's discursive analyses broaden the field beyond only examining cultural texts explicitly forged in the colonial crucible. Similarly, by beginning to identify specific markers of Englishness (empiricism, classic irony, denigration of the body), Easthope also moves past the thematicisation of an identity founded throughout difference by instead offering the possibility that this dialectic might be located in the very rhetoric and form of the discourse itself. Furthermore, by looking at contemporary English expressions of nationness, this book opens up new ground for postcolonial criticism through the examination of post-imperial British texts whose very features betray the continuing legacy of Empire.… (altro)