Seminar 3: A Conservative Modernity? 1. Was the embrace of the countryside in imagining the nation cause or effect of an anti-modern culture in twentieth-century Britain? 2. What were the implications of the First World War for the relationship between the nation and gender in Britain? 3. To what extent can we account for the interwar fortunes of the Conservative party in terms of its successful mobilisation of ideas of the nation?

Seminar Reading

P. Mandler, ‘Against “Englishness”: English Culture and the Limits to Rural Nostalgia, 1850-1940’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6^th Series, 7 (1997), 155-75. Martin Wiener, ‘The “

English Way of Life”’ (Chapter 4), in Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit, 1850-1980 (1981), pp. 41-80. Susan Kingsley Kent, ‘The Politics of Sexual Difference: World War I and the Demise of British Feminism’, Journal of British Studies, 27 (1988), 232-53. Ross McKibbin, ‘Class and Conventional Wisdom: The Conservative Party and the “Public” in Inter-war Britain’, in McKibbin, The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain, 1880-1950 (1990), pp. 259-93.

Further Reading

J. Baxendale, ‘”I had seen a lot of Englands”: J.B. Priestley, Englishness, and the People’, History Workshop Journal, 5 (2001), 87-111 Angus Calder, ‘Deep England’ in his The Myth of the Blitz (1991) Martin Clapson, Invincible Green Suburbs, Brave New Towns: Social Change and Urban Dispersal in Postwar England (1998) Hugh Cunningham, ‘The Conservative Party and Patriotism’ in R. Colls & P. Dodd (eds.), Englishness (1986), 283-308 Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (1977) Judy Giles, Women, Identity, and Private Life, 1900-1950 (1985) Judy Giles, The Parlour and the Suburb: Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity (2004) Nicoletta Gullace, The Blood of Our Sons: Men, Women, and the Re-Negotiation of British Citizenship during the Great War (2002) Alan Howkins, ‘The Discovery of Rural England’, in R. Colls & P. Dodd (eds.), Englishness, 62-88 David Jarvis, ‘British Conservatism and Class Politics in the 1920s’, English Historical Review, 111 (1996) D.N. Jeans, ‘Planning and the Myth of the English Countryside in the Interwar period’, Rural History, 1 (1990), 249-64 T. Jeffrey, ‘The Suburban Nation: Politics and Class in Lewisham’, in G. Stedman Jones & D. Feldman (eds.), Metropolis London: Histories and Representations since 1800 (1989), 189-216 Susan Kingsley Kent, Making Peace: The Reconstruction of Gender in Interwar Britain (1994) * Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature, and Conservatism between the Wars (1991) D. Lowenthal, ‘British National Identity and the English Landscape’, Rural History, 2 (1991), 205-30 * David Matless, Englishness and Landscape (1998) David Matless, ‘One Man’s England: W.G. Hoskins and the English Culture of Landscape’, Rural History, 4 (1993), 187-201 C.H. Perry, ‘In Search of H.V. Morton: Travel Writing and Cultural values in the First Age of British Democracy’, 20^th Century British History, 10 (1999), 431-56 A. Potts, ‘”Constable Country” between the Wars’, in R. Samuel (ed.), Patriotism III: National Fictions (1989), 160-88 Michael Roper, ‘Between Manliness and Masculinity: The “War Generation” and the Psychology of Fear in Britain, 1914-1950’, Journal of British Studies, 44 (2005), 343-62 Raphael Samuel, ‘Country Visiting’, in Island Stories, pp. 132-52 Frank Trentmann, ‘Civilisation and its Discontents: English Neo-Romanticism and the Transformation of Anti-Modernism in Twentieth-Century Western Culture’, Journal of Contemporary History, 29 (1994), 583-625 Chris Waters, ‘J.B. Priestley: Englishness and the Politics of Nostalgia’, in S. Pedersen & P. Mandler (eds.), After the Victorians (1994), 209-26 * Martin Wiener, English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit (1981) Jay Winter, ‘British National Identity and the First World War’, in S. Green & C. Whiting (eds.), The Boundaries of the State in Modern Britain.