Singular Continuities: Tradition, Nostalgia, and Identity in Modern British Culture

This volume explores the appropriation of the past in modern British culture. Today, at the beginning of a new millennium, the mass media would have us believe that Britain is suffering an identity crisis. If the pundits are correct, we are witnessing a manipulation of British history at the hands of those keen to project a new national image—or in the language of commodification, to "rebrand" Britain. The twelve essays in Singular Continuities take a different tack. They argue that to distinguish between "the new" and "the traditional" in modern English culture often draws a false dichotomy, that British-ness, in fact, has been the product of continuous creation throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The contributors strongly suggest that "tradition" derives from constant reimagining, if not from calculated invention. Such reimagining has often assumed surprising forms. Thus, for example, at the end of Victoria's reign, an "enemy" culture—that of the Boer farmer—was recruited to the British ideal of pastoral self-sufficiency. Similarly, the iconoclastic surrealism of the interwar artist Humphrey Jennings was actually suffused with a celebratory sense of the British past. And during the 1970s and 1980s, working-class autobiography eulogized not the triumph of character over circumstance but rather an industrial nostalgia that recalled a cityscape where slum neighbors once knew their turf and the people who occupied it. Related themes are pursued in essays that range from the demonizing of Irish immigrants in early-Victorian London to the impact of reading on suffrage activism, from the professionalization of social work to the selling of the past in Thatcher's Britain. What has been termed "heritage-bashing" finds few echoes in this collection. "Heritage" is a remarkably protean notion, as useful to the political left as to the right, to feminists as well as to would-be patriarchs. It is the malleable nature of British cultural continuity that makes its heritage "singular."

Table of Contents:
Introduction George Behlmer and Fred Leventhal; Part I. The Politics of Nostalgia: 1. Land reform and the imagined past in nineteenth-century Britain Jamie Bronstein; 2. Reading radicalism/reading resistance: transformations and accommodations in suffragist discourse, 1890-1907 Laura Mayhall; 3. The long nineteenth century of British conservatism, 1880-1970 Reba Soffer; 4. The 1939 royal visit to the United States Fred Leventhal; 5. Autobiography, subjectivity, and memory: change and continuity in the practices of working-class selfhood Chris Waters; 6. Nostalgia, the heritage industry, and the London antiques trade: selling the past in Thatcher's Britain Howard Malchow; Part II. Tradition and Modernity: 7. Identity, immigration, and the state: Irish immigrants and English settlement in London, 1790-1840 Patricia Seleski; 8. The first world war as indicator of continuity and change in modern British sport John Osbourne; 9. 'Character'-building: continuity in social work practice, 1870-1930 George Behlmer; 10. Recasting the nation: change and continuity in 'the higher journalism', May 1923 Stewart Weaver; 11. Image and Englishness: Walter Benjamin, Humphrey Jennings, and modernity Michael Saler; 12. Vanessa's garden Susan Bell.

About the Author :
George K. Behlmer is Professor of History at the University of Washington. He is the author, most recently, of Friends of the Family: The English Home and Its Guardians (Stanford, 1998). Fred M. Leventhal is Professor of History at Boston University. His most recent publication (Editor) is Twentieth-Century Britain: An Encyclopedia.

Review :
"While each of these essays can be read individually, and a review summary cannot even begin to do justice to the richness of the themes and arguments that they contain, their collective impact is to provide a new level of understanding about the varieties and persistence of tradition and nostalgia in modern British history." - Albion