Quintessences of Englishness

The article examines how “quintessential” features of Englishness have been defined in two very different kinds of texts, John Fowles’s “On Being English But Not British” and in Julian Barnes’s novel England, England, both to be examined in relation to each other, to their specific chronotopes and to developing stages leading up to postmodernist irony and anti-foundationalism. The phrase “quintessences of Englishness,” ironically used in Barnes’s novel to refer to a new, updated, more authentic version of a country having fallen behind the times in a post-Thatcher age, invites a dialogue across several decades between two authors, Fowles and Barnes, and two attitudes toward constructions of national identity.