Book contents
- The Nation in British Literature and Culture
- Cambridge Themes in British Literature and Culture
- The Nation in British Literature and Culture
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Part I Origins
- Part II Writing the Nation
- Part III Revolutions and Empires
- Part IV Making the Modern Nation
- Chapter 14 ‘It’s Being So Cheerful That Keeps Me Going’
- Chapter 15 The New British
- Chapter 16 Censorship
- Chapter 17 ‘Wake Up the Nation’
- Chapter 18 Queer Nation
- Part V Futures
- Index
Chapter 14 - ‘It’s Being So Cheerful That Keeps Me Going’
The Nation in the Second World War
from Part IV - Making the Modern Nation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 July 2023
- The Nation in British Literature and Culture
- Cambridge Themes in British Literature and Culture
- The Nation in British Literature and Culture
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgements
- Part I Origins
- Part II Writing the Nation
- Part III Revolutions and Empires
- Part IV Making the Modern Nation
- Chapter 14 ‘It’s Being So Cheerful That Keeps Me Going’
- Chapter 15 The New British
- Chapter 16 Censorship
- Chapter 17 ‘Wake Up the Nation’
- Chapter 18 Queer Nation
- Part V Futures
- Index
Summary
War intensifies conceptions of national identity, generating unifying models of ‘us’ that can be set against configurations of the enemy ‘other’. As enemies change, so too does the model of the nation that confronts them. Yet, while the nation at war is necessarily protean, the pressure to articulate it as a coherent entity increases. This chapter uses the Second World War as a case study of war’s capacity to reimagine the nation and to generate coercive models of belonging and exclusion. Exploring both British film culture and the writing of cooperation and complaint, the chapter draws on diverse examples to map the mutation of the national ideal from a mythological ‘village England’ to an imagined future for a new generation. This transition from the spatial to the temporal encapsulates the difficulty of finding common ‘national’ ground and viable discourses of patriotism in the aftermath of the First World War.
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- The Nation in British Literature and Culture , pp. 243 - 259Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2023