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  • An Imaginary England: Nation, Landscape and Literature, 1840–1920
  • Alistair M. Duckworth (bio)
An Imaginary England: Nation, Landscape and Literature, 1840–1920, by Roger Ebbatson; pp. vii + 232. Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2005, £50.00, $99.95.

In this well-informed and densely argued study, Roger Ebbatson confirms Raymond Williams's view in The Country and the City (1973) that landscape evocations of an ideal England are seldom innocent of ideology. Like Williams he aims to uncover the mystifications typical of rural representations: "What constitutes a life of toil for the field-worker is culturally transformed into a site of leisure for more privileged groups" (11). An Imaginary England differs from Williams's book, however, in treating a shorter period and in including marginal texts among better known ones. Thus, alongside major poems by Alfred Tennyson, Thomas Hardy, Rupert Brooke, and Edward Thomas, Ebbatson devotes a chapter to the sonnets of Charles Tennyson Turner, and his chosen novelists are minor figures: Richard Jefferies and Arthur Quiller-Couch. The very minor Florence Henniker is one of his two examples of a short story writer (the other being D. H. Lawrence). Oddly, given Ebbatson's interest in "proto-feminist" representations of landscape (11–12), Henniker is the only woman author he treats.

Writing a generation after Williams, Ebbaston is far more theoretically inclined. He reads against the grain, seeking "to reveal the gender, race and class implications that haunt the political unconscious of [his] chosen texts" (3), and he supports his interpretations at length with a host of references to theorists of phenomenology, Marxism, deconstruction, rhetoric, semiology, feminism, and postcolonialism. So lengthy and frequent [End Page 551] are his theoretical engagements that the literary text sometimes becomes a subordinate concern, a symptom of the author's ideological complicity in imperial dominance abroad or patriarchal dominance at home that may be exposed through the formulations of Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, or Homi Bhabha. Lateral thinking characterizes the method throughout. You can be sure that Henniker's "Spectres of the Real" (1896) will take you to Derrida's Specters of Marx (1994), or that Q's (Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch's) Poison Island (1907) will be understood in terms of Derrida's pharmakon.

As the preface acknowledges, the study brings together a number of previously published pieces, which may explain its theoretical heterogeneity. Ebbatson claims that his critique is "fundamentally materialist or historicist" (13), and it is true that historicism characterizes his approach in several chapters. Thus in chapter 1 he connects the "insurrectionary anxieties" detectable in Tennyson's idylls to Chartist demands for reform that threatened the conservative-liberal hegemony in the years following the 1832 Reform Bill (30–32). In chapter 2 he reminds us that Enoch Arden (1864), with its "patriarchal and imperial overtones" (45), appeared soon after the Indian Mutiny and in the same year as the Crown's acquisition of Nigeria. And in chapter 5 he finds that "The Spectre of the Real," a story jointly authored by Henniker and Hardy for magazine publication, is both implicated in the imperial project and reflective of "cultural panic concerning the nature of Englishness centering upon Fenianism, socialism and the New Woman" (90).

Not all of Ebbatson's chapters, however, offer such specific historical contexts. The third chapter, on the sonnets of Tennyson Turner, is much closer to traditional literary history. True, Ebbatson sees the author's finest poems as arising from anxieties over the intrusion of the machine into scenes of rural peace. But other emphases—biographical, psychological, and formalist—come together to form an appreciative rehabilitation of a minor poet, one whose constitutional melancholy and opium addiction are transcended in his sonnets. In this chapter, Ebbatson's concern is less with the political unconscious of texts than with the quality of the poetry. No fewer than nine sonnets are quoted in full, including the superb "Julius Caesar and the Honey Bee" (1864). Even when Ebbatson turns to history, as in his remarks on "The Steam Threshing-Machine" (1868), he does so by way of a literary-historical comparison with the similar scene in Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) (67).

Historicism vies with Heidegger in Ebbatson...

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