'Landscape & Englishness' - November Reading Group Session

This session will be led by Xiaofan Xu, a PhD student in the School of English. Xiaofan has slightly changed the focus of her session from the one originally advertised and will now be discussing ‘Landscape & Englishness’.

***Please note that this session will not be taking place on the usual last Wednesday of the month, but instead on Thursday 27th November, 3-4pm, Trent A35.***

Xiaofan has kindly provided two readings, available to those on the mailing list, and the following introduction to her session:

• Esty, Jed, 'Modernism and Metropolitan Perception in England', in A Shrinking Island: Modernism and National Culture in England (Princeton University Press, 2004), pp. 23-53.
• Matless, David, 'Introduction: Versions of Landscape and Englishness', in Landscape and Englishness (Reaktion Books, 1998), pp. 9-24.

The readings for this session, ‘Landscape and Englishness’, are immensely relevant to the ideas we discussed last time in Nicola’s session on ‘Landscape and Memory’, particularly the idea of landscape/landschaft as an ideal construct with potential duplicity and its bearings on national identity. For this session, we will be leaning more towards the particularity of England in the first half of the twentieth century. Possible topics of interest might be: Englishness versus Britishness, localism in the imperial context, and the modernity of rural nostalgia underlying a nationalist discourse. I am particularly interested in the (im)possibility of integration of the individual into the collective and national memory in the landscape, something which I hope we might have the chance to discuss during the session.

All postgraduate students and staff welcome. We hope to see as many of you there as possible!