National faith: Heritage culture and English identity from Tennyson to Byatt (Alfred Tennyson, Baron Tennyson, A. S. Byatt)

This dissertation focuses on the genealogy and current state of heritage institutions in England to explain the present fraught relationship between heritage culture and English identity. Modern heritage, an ideologically charged conception of a nation's cultural inheritance, comes into being as the disciplines of modern history writing, natural history, anthropology, and archaeology emerge in the early nineteenth century and together establish the artifact as a meaningful category of cultural identification. Concurrently, the English Church, vested with England's spiritual and national consensus, begins to decline, dislodging the nation's cultural and religious identities from their customary abode. Heritage institutions, from the National Gallery to the National Trust, arise in the latter half of the nineteenth century in response both to a change in the nation's sense of its material past, as well as to the loss of the Church as the primary conservator of Englishness.; Heritage collections furthermore produce what modern museology calls the aura of the original artifact. Once material objects themselves come to be invested with the aura of the original, they begin to poach upon the territory of the immaterial, the spiritual, and the metaphysical. Both Tennyson's poetry and Hardy's Wessex novels register this transformation. In the first part of the twentieth century, the disconcertingly lively material of England's past threatens to overwhelm the present, provoking writers such as E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf to challenge an increasingly backward-looking vision of English identity. Two world wars and the collapse of empire require an assertion of British identity between 1914 and 1956, but from the middle of the twentieth century onward, English identity becomes almost wholly invested in the notion of national heritage. An entire industry dedicated to the critical reassessment of heritage culture contributes daily to the nation's fear that English identity sits precariously atop a pile of cultural artifacts held loosely together by vague sentimentality. Yet those, like A. S. Byatt and Julian Barnes, who attempt to allay the nation's anxieties about its own identity and the nature of its past, consistently return to the effervescence of the artifact and its ability to link England's past and present.