Nation & Landscape, 1840–1920

This is a timely book on an important theme, but one whose claim on our attention is undermined by problems with its construction and its writing style. Ebbatson's aim is to describe the development of the notion of Englishness from 1840 to 1920 in relation to the representation of landscape in literature, arguing that, rather than each embodying, as we might suppose, both a settled identity and "a sense of national continuity," they instead exhibit symptoms of hybridity and displacement, alongside their general aspiration to a secure feeling of belonging. He argues his case by examining a series of texts, by authors as various as Alfred Tennyson and his brother, Charles Tennyson Turner, as well as Thomas Hardy, the rural essayist and novelist, Richard Jefferies, Arthur Quiller-Couch, Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas and D. H. Lawrence. Ebbatson's stated concern is to use "a group of marginalised texts by canonical authors" as well as a group of texts by noncanonical writers to "enable Englishness to be conceptualised as a type of 'border study,'" where these texts can be "read and theorised in terms of a transcultural dialogue between dominant and resistant voices." Ebbatson uses the insights of contemporary cultural theory, especially postcolonial theory, to reconsider these works, showing how Englishness was in fact shaped by a relationship between what was thought of as the centre—of England, of "home"—and what was on the periphery or margin of the empire or of the self.

There is a clear merit in Ebbatson's approach: national identity always, necessarily, functions in a comparative way, and so any discussion about Englishness calls into question the other places, people or literary works that it is not, directly, talking about. In particular, the self-conscious kind of Englishness that developed in some parts of late- nineteenth-century literary culture clearly did so in relation to those other places: to European countries like Germany which seemed more adept at marshalling a public-minded and patriotic spirit; to a United States that, despite its divisions, seemed to still be associated with the positive implications of a progressive, western movement; and to those places at the margins of the British empire from which many fictional heroes returned, either confirmed and strengthened in their masculinity, or given a new, troubled awareness of the primitive in the world, or even in themselves. Such awareness was reflected in the ways that English landscapes were described in the literature of the period: they often take on a new kind of privacy or inwardness, as shown in the new interest in a domesticated "south country," with its occluded spaces, like the hidden path that is the real "heart of England," in Edward Thomas's phrase, "because nobody owns it and nobody uses it." The difficulty with An Imaginary England is that it tends to revolve these concerns rather than really addressing them, despite the fact that it contains many interesting and sometimes fascinating insights in passing. Ebbatson begins his preface by noting that "this study has been a long time gestating," and it does seem that the book is the expression of a constellation of long-held interests rather than the working out of a continuous argument. An aspect of this is the comparative lack of detailed historical context about the worlds in which these texts circulated, even though Ebbatson commits himself to a "fundamentally materialist or historicist" critique; instead, the worlds of the texts examined are placed alongside the words of recent critics and theorists—without any recourse to, say, description of how these works were received when first published—a method which tends to have a flattening effect on the literary and cultural history that he is trying to illuminate.

Furthermore, there is often a kind of unevenness in Ebbatson's treatment of these figures, which seems to be the product of slightly confused political impulses. In his introduction he states, boldly, that "An Imaginary England seeks to unmask some of the ideological aspects of landscape representation, reading against...