Book 1066 and all that6/10/2023 ![]() Duffy undertakes to follow the emergence of ideas and feelings of Englishness from pre-Roman times to the present. The octopus of national myth is the dread and cunning beast faced by the distinguished novelist Maureen Duffy in England: The Making of the Myth. English parodies of English attitudes serve, at times, to reinforce them. To entertain it, even ironically, may involve becoming part of it. Myth is an understandable and necessary modus vivendi, a way for people to characterise themselves to themselves and then to the world of all the Others, but it cannot be neutral. The writer studying mythologies of Englishness is, to put it mildly, spoilt for choice. ![]() If my England takes place in flat-vowelled, coal-fired murk, a perpetual 1950s lit only by black-and-white war movies, what about yours? Pony Club camps and farm holidays? Boarding school? I see. Or c) they live in Scunthorpe and Coalville, mind their own business and do not care to be characterised in any way. ![]() ![]() Alternatively, the English are b) fair-minded, eager to help in a crisis, modest, self-effacing, ironic, brave, stronger in the second half, with profound reserves of romantic feeling, pastoral sensibilities and an unrivalled fund of poetry. ![]()
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