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The author discusses the construction of Englishness in Katherine Mansfield’s short story Je Ne Parle Pas Français using previous accounts for Englishness, Otherness and the context of modernism –primarily featuring imperialism. The author concludes that there is an English identity portrayed in Je Ne Parle Pas Français, but that it is to a greater extent associated with imperialism than other identifiable cultural traits.

Historians have shown how, in the last third of the nineteenth century, the language of patriotism and national identity was appropriated by the political right. It has been all too easily assumed that after this they held a monopoly on such language. However, the British left did not give up ideas about patriotism and the nature of Englishness after the revival of socialism in the 18805. Socialism was rather presented as the restoration of an English past lost to industrial capitalism. They therefore argued for a return to 'Merrie England'. Socialists frequently used radical patriotic vocabulary as a tool in their struggles for social transfotmation, particularly in defence of what they saw as traditional English liberties. But some socialists also used ideas of Englishness to legitimate their own form of socialism and to repudiate other forms, such as anarchism, syndicalism and Marxism, as 'foreign'. Central to this was a belief that Parliament stood at the centre of the national history. This Whiggish parliamentary view of history was essentially English, yet many who held it were Scottish, Welsh and Irish, and they played a full role in creating a 'British Socialism' . The First World War dealt a severe blow to radical patriotism. Pro-war sections of the labour movement were brought into the state, and this reinforced their belief in parliamentarism and a consensual patriotism. The anti-war left continued to use radical patriotic language in the early years of the war, for example against the 'foreign yoke' of conscription, but the war degraded patriotism generally and the Russian Revolution gave internationalism a new focus. It also threatened the concept of British Socialism, and the post-war years saw a bitter debate over forms of socialism, when it was argued that Bolshevism was not suited to 'British conditions'. Moderate Labour, convinced that office could only be achieved on terms set by the British Constitution, sought to prove their fitness to govern. This meant concentration on traditional patriotism and the national interest, rather than conceptions of oppositional Englishness. The left of the labolD' movement now looked to soviet Russia rather than the English past as a model for the future socialist society. Hence the hold of radical patriotism on the British left was broken, but that of patriotism was not. It would take another world war to re-unite the two.

Undergraduate thesis

According to Robinson (2008), England exists more in imagination than it does anywhere else, except on the sports field. However, Englishness remains relatively unexplored in discussions of sporting nationalism. For so long, academics have focused on the ways in which male sport plays a key role in (re)producing national identities, with the contribution of women to the relationship between sport and national identity formation undeniably ignored. Based on interviews with 19 elite sportswomen from England s netball, football, rugby and cricket teams, this thesis examines the relationship between gendered, national and sporting identities, giving a voice to England s heroines of sport . These sports were chosen as the women had only represented England, rather than Great Britain, in international sport. Few research studies have adopted this approach of speaking to athletes about their national identities, although significantly, those that have were not concerned with women (see Tuck, 1999; Tuck and Maguire, 1999; McGee and Bairner 2011). The challenge was not only to integrate personal experiences into discussions of sport and national identity, but also to try to incorporate gender into these very discussions. The question here is whether women s sport has a place in the national imagination, and how do those very women who embody their nation on the field of play articulate their experiences. Central to this research is an understanding of the ways in which we perform aspects of our identity. Building on work by Butler (1990) and Edensor (2002), we can understand how international sport provides a site where multiple identities are performed. Findings suggest that performances of femininities are contextual, and that elite sport is an arena where displays of heteronormative femininity are inappropriate. In addition, sport serves to clarify imaginings of Englishness, where previously it may have been confused or conflated with conceptions of Britishness. What was clear throughout the research, however, was the performative nature of the participants identities, as well as the way in which their identities can be conceptualised as multiple and fluid, subject to change depending upon context and circumstance.

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This thesis explores Englishness and its representation in translated children’s literature in Russia during the Soviet period (from 1917 until 1991) and the post-Soviet period (from 1992 until 2015). It focuses on Russian translations of English children’s classics published between the late-Victorian period and the Second World War. It studies how Russian translations of English children’s literature construct literary portrayals of Englishness in varied socio-cultural and historical contexts. It investigates the complex processes involved in re-creating national specificities of English literary texts in Russian culture. The Anglo-centric essence of Englishness – or ‘dobraia staraia Angliia’ [good old England] – is expressed to a greater degree in the classics of English children’s literature. It is this particular idealised Englishness that is represented in the Russian translations. This thesis demonstrates that various manifestations of Englishness are modified in Russian translations and that the degree of modification varies according to changes in the political climate in Russia. A significant role is played by ideology – of a prevailing political nature during in the Soviet Union and a commercial ideology in post-Soviet Russia. The first chapter lays the theoretical foundation for the whole thesis and outlines the methodology adopted. Chapters 2 and 3 set out the contextual background for understanding Englishness by focusing on the question of Englishness perceived from English and Russian perspectives, and discussing the main tendencies of representing Englishness in both cultures. Chapter 4 presents the historical background by highlighting the political and cultural circumstances in which Russian translations were made. The second half of the thesis (chapters five, six and seven) focuses on the analysis of the representation of Englishness in Russian translations. Chapter 5 discusses which English children’s books, published between the late-Victorian period and the Second World War, were selected for translation and at what point between 1918 and 2015. Chapters 6 and 7 present the case studies in this thesis. These provide an analysis of how different manifestations of Englishness were translated and, taking into account the Soviet and post-Soviet historical contexts, examine why they were translated in certain ways.

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No description available.

"What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photograph your mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing, except that you happen to be the same person". This comes from George Orwell's wartime pamphlet The Lion and the Unicorn in which, according to Tosco Fyvel, he sought "to identify himself with England in its finest hour". Orwell offered a more prosaic justification – "I don't share the average English intellectual's hatred of his own country" – in one of his regular "London Letters" to the American Partisan Review and from these three sources a complex constellation of questions emerges. The issue at stake is Orwell's relationship with his country and it involves ideas of identity, history, ownership, love, hatred, community and, crucially, his position as spokesperson. Drawing and expanding upon work on Orwell and Englishness, focusing on Orwell's often overlooked originality as a novelist and challenging Raymond Williams' influential account in Orwell and Culture and Society, "Re-Conditioning England" seeks to negotiate a path through this complex of questions. This path, as the title and opening quotation imply, is guided by the past and by Orwell's engagement with the mid-nineteenth century mode of social realism. It is informed by Williams' conception of the novel as a "knowable community" and Benedict Anderson's of the nation as an "imagined community". A chronological and contextual study, the thesis pays attention, throughout, to both when and where Orwell wrote. It places his work within contemporary debates over the status of Charles Dickens, poetry, language and the nation to the end of arguing: in his engagement with contemporary social-problems, Orwell first consciously updates and then self-consciously critiques the nineteenth-century genre of condition-of-England writing.