England was probably the first country in Europe to construct a sense of itself as a nation state, but even as it did so the boundaries of native tradition remained uncertain. In the sixteenth century two competing narratives of nationhood are visible, one British and the other Anglo-Saxon (Warner, Spenser, Drayton), and it is the second, more specifically English narrative that comes to supersede the British story (Shakespeare’s histories). Those narratives are complemented in the field of verse form by a further competition between art, represented by classical metres, and nature, represented by native English ‘rhyme’, in which the latter asserts its claims to literary status and value, and history and prosody then converge in the idea of the long line. The achievement of a sense of English national identity in literature is finally constructed as a triumph of nature over art (Daniel).

Called by P. B. Shelley ‘the master-theme of the epoch’, the French Revolution profoundly affected British literature, giving new energy to the nascent Romantic movement while dissolving the boundary between literature and politics. This chapter examines the polarisation of British public opinion in the aftermath of the Revolution and the contestation of its ideas in the 1790s ‘pamphlet war’. The chapter analyses eye-witness accounts of the Revolution by British expatriates such as H. M. Williams and the dilemmas faced by British radicals when war was declared and the Revolution took an increasingly violent course. Wordsworth’s autobiographical account of these conflicts in The Prelude (1805) is set against later imaginative reconstructions of the Revolution by Shelley, Carlyle and Dickens and the more indirect expression of revolutionary shock in Gothic fiction. The chapter concludes by noting the linguistic legacy of the Revolution experience, which created much of the political vocabulary by which we still discuss ideas of nationhood.

This chapter examines how and when British government officials considered the nation’s reputation and international standing in decisions about whether to censor literature or theatrical performances. In the early twentieth century, officials in the Home and Lord Chamberlain’s Offices, among others, were eager to appear rational to their Parisian counterparts in the hope that French officials would increase efforts to suppress obscene publications. Simultaneously, British administrators expressed disapproval of American censors, whom they viewed as unduly prudish. As the century wore on, the Americans would outpace British censors in their toleration of obscene materials, and an increasing number of British citizens came to view their government’s response to texts like Lady Chatterley’s Lover as benighted and paternalistic. The chapter argues that British censorship was not a strictly national activity but rather took place within the larger framework of international relations and a pursuit of global prestige.

After sketching the gradual unification of Scotland as a kingdom in the mediaeval period, this chapter looks at Scotland’s entry into Great Britain with the Union of Crowns in 1603. The Scottish king, James I & VI, was an important engineer of the British union, although throughout the succeeding Stuart era during the rest of the seventeenth century confessional tensions, especially surrounding prelacy and Presbyterianism, remain rife. Such tensions are reflected in Scottish literature and continue with added conflictual pinch-points following the Union of Parliaments (1707) and the Jacobite rebellions in the first half of the eighteenth century. Debates about improvement, primitivism and the nature of Britishness endure in Scottish literature from that time until the present. From the Victorian era, Scottish culture can be read as subsumed within Britishness, and yet from the twentieth century new patriotic Scottish agendas, including political nationalism, sought a renewed distinctiveness for Scotland, reflected often in literary debates.

Historically, the idea of Britain is closely tied to Wales and the Welsh people, who saw themselves as the sovereign rulers of the island nation of Britain, cruelly dispossessed by the Saxons. This chapter traces the historical processes by which the kingdom of England first asserted and then legally established its right to include Wales within the nation of England, appropriating Britishness as a proxy for Englishness. This ideological strategy, first normalised by the Tudors and resisted through Welsh literary production, continues to the present day. In the twentieth century, the rise of Anglophone writing in Wales challenged the link between the Welsh language and Welsh nationhood, but increasing immigration and the achievement of devolution in 1999 encouraged a more inclusive and multilingual national identity. Though political devolution has enabled Wales to define itself as a substate nation within a federated state, the ideological impetus to claim Britishness for itself continues across the border in England.

Irish poets wrote as much about love and beauty, memory, God and grief as their French, or English, or Dutch counterparts, but viewed in the round Irish literature, in Irish and English, is indelibly stamped by the cultural and political experience of colonisation. From the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century bards’ and chroniclers’ literary record of a distressed Gaelic civilisation and of the depredations of foreign heretics, to the nineteenth-century novelists wrestling with the concept of ‘national character’ as destiny in the age of union, Ireland’s British Question could not, it seems, be avoided.

This chapter situates the sixteenth-century drive to define ’Englishness’ through literature within a broader European context, charting the widespread efforts to reify ’national character’ through the production of standardised grammars for vernaculars and assertions of their peculiar grace. After surveying early modern thought on the relationship between language, nation and empire, the chapter discusses the particular strategy adopted by English writers (centrally Puttenham and Sidney) to establish the very peripheral barbarousness of the English tongue as a proof of its distinction, before pointing at the close towards the emerging role of empire in underpinning notions of Englishness.

This chapter discusses how the English nation was imagined in new ways in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It argues that the idea of a distinct English self was increasingly articulated in the context of imperial and mercantile ambitions and and ventures. These ventures helped consolidate the idea that the English were better than foreign peoples, as well as superior to their rivals such as the Spanish or the Dutch. The English both defined themselves in opposition to those they sought to colonise or trade with or to their imperial rivals and also borrowed from them. Imperial nationalism deeply reshaped ideas about proper gender roles, coupledom and marriage, procreation and child-rearing and racial and religious identities. To illustrate this, the chapter discusses the writings of Richard Hakluyt, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Donne, William Shakespeare, Thomas Middleton and other writers of the period.

War intensifies conceptions of national identity, generating unifying models of ‘us’ that can be set against configurations of the enemy ‘other’. As enemies change, so too does the model of the nation that confronts them. Yet, while the nation at war is necessarily protean, the pressure to articulate it as a coherent entity increases. This chapter uses the Second World War as a case study of war’s capacity to reimagine the nation and to generate coercive models of belonging and exclusion. Exploring both British film culture and the writing of cooperation and complaint, the chapter draws on diverse examples to map the mutation of the national ideal from a mythological ‘village England’ to an imagined future for a new generation. This transition from the spatial to the temporal encapsulates the difficulty of finding common ‘national’ ground and viable discourses of patriotism in the aftermath of the First World War.

This chapter examines the colonial novel of the 1920s–1940s as a form that mediates and distils the imperial logic that connects the nation and the colony. Divided into two sections, the chapter argues that the colonial novel thinks about the difference – even as it brings that difference into being – between that which is the imperial-national and that which constitutes the colonial, and the relationship between the two. The first section focuses on the representations of the colonial club – the center of political, economic, social and affective energy – as the natural site for exploring the emergence and decline of the British colonial sphere and its relationship with the imperial structures of the nation. The second section examines how two late colonial novels depict the impotence, misery and accrued weariness of imperial rule. The novels carefully and deliberately unravel any notion of imperial authority, in institutions or in individuals, and foreground the distance between imperial rhetoric and colonial reality.

This chapter focuses on the pairing of popular fiction and imperialism. It takes as a starting point the historical coincidence of the rise of new forms of popular fiction with the intensification of colonialism in Britain during the New Imperialism (roughly from the 1870s to 1914). Examining titles including H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885), Richard Marsh’s The Beetle (1897), Rudyard Kipling’s Kim (1901) and numerous others, the discussion treats Victorian popular fiction as both a site where colonialist ideology exerts its power and a site where ambivalences, vagaries and paradoxes speak of a struggle to make sense of imperial rationales. Examining how popular fiction represents history and the individual, landscape and temporality, threat and assimilation and the supposed adaptability of Englishness reveals some of the rhetorical and ideological contortions that rendered British imperialism thinkable to its own prosecutors.

This chapter tracks the emergence and evolution of the concept of the British nation from the twelfth century through to the present, from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s first attempt to fashion an image of a distinct British nation to the severe challenges the national unit of the United Kingdom has faced in the wake of Brexit and other recent developments. The chapter explores the issue of how the nation is constituted and constructed and, specifically, the role that literature (and culture more generally) plays both in facilitating that construction and in interrogating it. The particular – often fraught – place of Wales, Scotland and Ireland within a formation dominated by England is also explored, together with issues relating to internal colonialism and global imperialism. Among the other issues touched on are class, education, gender and race.