Fashioning England and the English - Literature, Nation, Gender

This book explores how literary texts envision England and respond to discourses and conceptions of Englishness and the English nation, especially in relation to gender and language. The essays discuss texts from the fifteenth to the twentieth century and bear witness to changing views of England and the English, highlighting the importance of religion, economy, landscape, the spectre of the 'other' and language in this discourse. The volume pays attention to women writers' reflection on the nation and the roles female figures play in male writers' visions of nationhood. It brings into conversation less well-known voices like those of Osbern Bokenham, Thomas Deloney, Eleanor Davies and Jacquetta Hawkes with canonical authors-William Shakespeare, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf-and opens a space for exploring the interplay of dominant and variant voices in the fashioning of England.


Rahel Orgis is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. She is the author of Narrative Structure and Reader Formation in Lady Mary Wroth's Urania (2017) and has published articles on early modern prose fiction and drama in the Sidney Journal, SPELL and ELR.
Matthias Heim works as digital publications manager for hep publishing in Berne, Switzerland. He has undertaken research on the space of war in early modern plays and investigated Shakespeare's low-frequency vocabulary through computer-aided statistics at the University of Neuchâtel. Currently he explores how battlefield images in cinema shape modern readings of battles in Shakespeare's plays.