Britishness, Popular Music, and National Identity

The Making of Modern Britain

Irene Morra (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

254 Seiten

2013
Routledge (Verlag)
978-0-415-83481-0 (ISBN)

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This book offers a major exploration of the social and cultural importance of popular music to contemporary celebrations of Britishness. Rather than providing a history of popular music or an itemization of indigenous musical qualities, it exposes the influential cultural and nationalist rhetoric around popular music and the dissemination of that rhetoric in various forms. Since the 1960s, popular music has surpassed literature to become the dominant signifier of modern British culture and identity. This position has been enforced in popular culture, literature, news and music media, political rhetoric -- and in much popular music itself, which has become increasingly self-conscious about the expectation that music both articulate and manifest the inherent values and identity of the modern nation. This study examines the implications of such practices and the various social and cultural values they construct and enforce. It identifies two dominant, conflicting constructions around popular music: music as the voice of an indigenous English ‘folk’, and music as the voice of a re-emergent British Empire. These constructions are not only contradictory but also exclusive, prescribing a social and musical identity for the nation that ignores its greater creative, national, and cultural diversity. This book is the first to offer a comprehensive critique of an extremely powerful discourse in England that today informs dominant formulations of English and British national identity, history, and culture.

Irene Morra is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English and Centre for Critical and Cultural Theory, Cardiff University, UK.

Preface Introduction 1. Opening Ceremony I: The National Tradition 2. The National Voice 3. Canon, Heritage, and Tradition 4. Retrenchment and Rebellion II: The Communal Voice 5. The English People: Fractures and Fraternity 6. Women and Song 7. Race and Indigeneity III: Empire and Nation 8. An Elizabethan Age 9. Yesterday Came Suddenly 10. The Empire Slips Back Conclusion

Reihe/Serie	Routledge Studies in Popular Music
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	152 x 229 mm
Gewicht	360 g
Themenwelt	Kunst / Musik / Theater ► Musik ► Pop / Rock
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Politische Systeme
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Politik / Verwaltung ► Politische Theorie
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Spezielle Soziologien
ISBN-10	0-415-83481-3 / 0415834813
ISBN-13	978-0-415-83481-0 / 9780415834810
Zustand	Neuware