This thesis investigates the interrelationship between contemporary Englishness and
historical fictions. It responds to two coeval elements of English culture that started to
emerge around the beginning of the present century: a revival of national
consciousness that arguably underpinned the 2016 vote to leave the European Union,
and a turn towards fiction set in the world of Henry VIII. Through a close reading of six
Henrician texts by Philippa Gregory, C.J. Sansom and Hilary Mantel, all of whom are
leading authors in the field, it aims to establish the reasons for this setting’s prevalence
and commercial success in the English historical fiction of the pre-Brexit period, and
to determine what this might tell us about the nature of English identity at this time.
Drawing on theories of nationhood and postmodernism, my analysis of the ways in
which these texts write England applies a postcolonial reading of English identity and
explores their interplay with nationalist discourses by mapping their themes and
preoccupations to contemporaneous polemical texts on the state of the nation. In so
doing, I identify a common focus on loss, melancholia, grievance and decline, and find
that in their re-writing of each other the novels illuminate the divisions and competing
instincts that have characterised English society before and since the EU referendum.
In taking this cultural materialist approach to a corpus of texts that re-work the
same elements of England’s past in different ways, the project contributes significantly
to the understanding of how fiction, cultural memory and politics intersect, highlighting
the ways in which they reflect, reinforce, or indeed undermine, the construction of
national identity. My work demonstrates how these multiple re-imaginings of this
specific historical period function as the ‘mirror and the light’ of the contemporary
nation and draws attention to the particularities of the English imaginary