The Habit that is Englishness

Abstract

When psychology and sociology investigate the role of narratives and memories in everyday life it is rare that the nation is brought into the conversation. Even those who do explicitly draw attention to it, are apt to maintain that it is a construction of a myriad of individual actors who thus propel the social phenomena in all sorts of new directions at will. It will be the contention here that while construction is indeed central to this process, it is a mistake to emphasize the spontaneity of an individual activity