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1 results

  • Chapter 14 - ‘It’s Being So Cheerful That Keeps Me Going’

  • from Part IV - Making the Modern Nation
  • Edited by Andrew Murphy, Trinity College Dublin
  • Book:
    The Nation in British Literature and Culture
    Published online:
    20 July 2023
    Print publication:
    10 August 2023, pp 243-259

  • 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.