Patrick Parrinder's Nation and Novel: The English Novel from Its Origins to the Present Day.

In the Guardian, Terry Eagleton reviews Patrick Parrinder's Nation and Novel: The English Novel from Its Origins to the Present Day.

The review makes for provocative and interesting reading - and is 511 pages shorter and £25 cheaper.

The review passes through the books rich landscape populated by the likes of Defoe, Scott and Dickens, and concludes with....

As the Victorian age passed into a world of mass migrations, new nation-states and the collapse of empires, national identity became an increasingly self-conscious literary topic. As Parrinder points out, the very idea of national identity, as opposed to national character, reflects a certain anxiety. National character, supposedly, is an objective set of features (in the case of the English, common sense, moderation, idiosyncrasy, philistinism, emotional reserve and so on), while identity is usually what you are still in search of. "What are we?" is a less unsettling question for a nation to ask itself than "Who are we?"


Related links:
EducationGuardian.co.uk | Books | What are we?
Link to the books page on Amazon