The Image of the English Gentleman in Twentieth-Century Literature: Englishness and Nostalgia

by Berberich,Christine

• ISBN13: 9780754661269
• ISBN10: 0754661261
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-12-28
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Studies of the English gentleman have tended to focus mainly on the nineteenth century, encouraging the implicit assumption that this influential literary trope has less resonance for twentieth-century literature and culture. Christine Berberich challenges this notion by showing that the English gentleman has proven to be a remarkably adaptable and relevant ideal that continues to influence not only literature but other forms of representation, including the media and advertising industries.Focusing on Siegfried Sassoon, Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh and Kazuo Ishiguro, whose presentations of the gentlemanly ideal are analysed in their specific cultural, historical, and sociological contexts, Berberich pays particular attention to the role of nostalgia and its relationship to 'Englishness'. Though 'Englishness' and by extension the English gentleman continue to be linked to depictions of England as the green and pleasant land of imagined bygone days, Berberich counterbalances this perception by showing that the figure of the English gentleman is the medium through which these authors and many of their contemporaries critique the shifting mores of contemporary society. Twentieth-century depictions of the gentleman thus have much to tell us about rapidly changing conceptions of national, class, and gender identity.

Table of Contents

The Gentleman, Englishness and Nostalgia

Approaches, Explanations, Definitions

The gentleman - an elusive term

From knight to public-school boy - following the gentleman through the ages

A popular literary trope - a brief history of the gentleman in literature

Of Heroes, Survivors and Dinosaurs

The Gentleman in 20th-Century Literature

The survival of the gentleman - Siegfried Sassoon, England and the sporting gentleman

Dancing to the music of Widmerpool - the gentleman in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time

Arcadia revisited? Evelyn Waugh's gentlemen

A pillar upholding nothing: nostalgia, Englishness and the English gentleman in Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day

The End of the Line?

Regression and reaction: past realities and future possibilities

Bibliography

Index

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