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.