In this book, Raphael Ingelbien examines how issues of nationhood have affected the works and the reception of several English and Irish poets - Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes, Geoffrey Hill and Seamus Heaney. This studyexplores the interactions between post-war English poets and the ways in which they transformed or misread earlier poetic visions of England - Romantic, Georgian, Modernist."

The politics of Englishness provides a digest of the debates about England and Englishness and a unique perspective on those debates. Not only does the book provide readers with ready access to and interpretation of the significant literature on the English Question, it also enables them to make sense of the political, historical and cultural factors which constitute that question. The book addresses the condition of England in three interrelated parts. The first looks at traditional narratives of the English polity and reads them as variations of a legend of political Englishness, of England as the exemplary exception, exceptional in its constitutional tradition and exemplary in its political stability. The second considers how the decay of that legend has encouraged anxieties about English political identity and about how English identity can be recognised within the new complexity of British governance. The third revisits these narratives and anxieties, examining them in terms of actual and metaphorical ‘locations’ of Englishness: the regional, the European and the British.

Weitere Angaben Inhalt: Anthony GRENVILLE: Preface Elke SEEFRIED: 'A noteworthy contribution in the fight against Nazism': Hubertus Prinz zu Löwenstein im Exil Patricia CLAVIN: 'A Wandering Scholar' in Britain and the USA, 1933-45: The Life and Work of Moritz Bonn Wilfried WEINKE: 'England find ich gut!' Facetten aus Leben und Werk des Autors Robert Muller Steven W. LAWRIE: 'Es soll diese Spur doch bleiben...' Hans Jacobus: Exile, National Socialism and the Holocaust Gillian LATHEY: Eulenspiegel to Owlyglass: The Impact of the Work of the Exiled Illustrators Walter Trier and Fritz Wegner on British Children's Literature Ulrike WALTON-JORDAN: 'Although he is Jewish, he is M&S': Jewish Refugees from Nazism and Marks & Spencer from the 1930s to the 1960s Jennifer TAYLOR: Into Exile: Ernst Sommer in London Ursula HUDSON-WIEDENMANN: Exil in Großbritannien: Die Keramikerin Grete Loebenstein-Marks Andrea HAMMEL: Selma Kahn - A Provincial Exile Jon HUGHES: AJR Information in the Context of German-language Exile Journal Publication, 1933-1945 Anthony GRENVILLE: Listening to Refugee Voices: The Association of Jewish Refugees Information and Research on the Refugees from Hitler in Britain Index

This book provides an overview of poetry from England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland from the postwar period through to the twenty-first century.

From the contents: S.E. Gontarski: Style and the man: Samuel Beckett and the art of pastiche. - Veronique Le Gall: Carcasse et deraison: la nature morte. - Michael D'Arcy: The task of the listener: Beckett, Proust, and perpetual translation. - Florence Godeau: Molloy aux mille tours. - Julie Campbell: Moran as secret agent. - Steve Barfield and Philip Tew: Philosophy, psychoanalysis and parody: exceedingly Beckett."

This book retraces the formation of modern English Studies by departing from philological scholarship along two lines: in terms of institutional histories and in terms of the separation of literary criticism and linguistics.

Englishness and Post-imperial Space: The Poetry of Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes probes into the English mindset immediately after the British withdrawal from the colonies, and examines how the loss of power and global prestige affected contemporary poetry, particularly that of Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes. Frustration and disillusionment, even anger, characterised the era and many of the literary works the period produced. Most writers became insular and were obsessed with the ‘English’ elements in their writing. The great, international and cosmopolitan themes (of Eliot, for instance) were replaced by those of narrow domestic importance. It is in such a context, this book argues, that Larkin and Hughes returned to the old England, most notably to the themes of gradually vanishing pristine landscape and national myths and legends, to the archetypal English customs and conventions. It examines their poetry mainly from the perspective of Englishness, a burgeoning area of academic interest. Intricately connected with the values emanating from England as a geographical and socio-cultural space, Englishness as a concept is intrinsic to the identity of a people who gradually became globally powerful. The loss of empire dealt a severe blow to this sense of the self. This book explores the dynamics of the representation of this sense of loss and the frustration it produced in the poems of Larkin and Hughes.