Englishness and Empire 1939-1965 by Wendy Webster

Englishness and Empire 1939-1965 by Wendy Webster

Did loss of imperial power and the end of empire have any significant impact on British culture and identity after 1945? Within a burgeoning literature on national identity and what it means to be British this is a question that has received surprisingly little attention. Englishness and Empire makes an important and original contribution to recent debates about the domestic consequences of the end of empire. Wendy Webster explores popular narratives of nation in the mainstream media archive - newspapers, newsreels, radio, film, and television. The contours of the study generally follow stories told through prolific filmic and television imagery: the Second World War, the Coronation and Everest, colonial wars of the 1950s, and Winston Churchill's funeral. The book analyses three main narratives that conflicted and collided in the period - a Commonwealth that promised to maintain Britishness as a global identity; siege narratives of colonial wars and immigration that showed a 'little England' threatened by empire and its legacies; and a story of national greatness, celebrating the martial masculinity of British officers and leaders, through which imperial identity leaked into narratives of the Second World War developed after 1945. The book also explores the significance of America to post-imperial Britain. Englishness and Empire considers how far, and in what contexts and unexpected places, imperial identity and loss of imperial power resonated in popular narratives of nataion. As the first monograph to investigate the significance of empire and its legacies in shaping national identity after 1945, this is an important study for all scholars interested in questions of national identity and their intersections with gender, race, empire, immigration, and decolonization.

..an impressive book, valuable for its exhaustive and multifaceted use of sources and for the author's sophisticated perceptions of cultural change and its impact. * William D. Rubinstein, The English Historical Review *

Wendy Webster, Professor of History, University of Huddersfield

Wendy Webster is Professor of Modern Cultural History at the University of Huddersfield and has published widely on twentieth-century history. She has been a Visiting Fellow at Australian National University and the University of Tasmania. Her previous books include Not A Man to Match Her: The
Marketing of a Prime Minister (1990), Imagining Home (1998), and the prize-winning Englishness and Empire (2005). Mixing It is part of a wider project involving a display at Imperial War Museum North.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780199226641
ISBN 10	0199226644
Title	Englishness and Empire 1939-1965
Author	Wendy Webster
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	Oxford University Press
Year published	2007-10-11
Number of pages	264
Prizes	Winner of Winner of the International Association for Media and History Prize.
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.