Abstract

In '"I have only one culture and it is not mine": Professions of English diaspora', Julian Wolfreys engages in acts of memory-work, to recover, through a focus on the voice as mnemotechnic and anamnesiac trace, the occluded and marginalized cultural differences of the regional English. Through a reflection on the work of the literary as archive and and the role folk song and folk culture play in the spectral maintenance of different Englishnesses over a thousand year period, Wolfreys argues that at a time when a national agenda for national identity is more urgently damaging than ever, turning to the embedded traces of different, pre-industrial pasts, offers modes of perception and representation that are based on equalities, rather than hierarchies of difference.

Julian Wolfreys

Julian Wolfreys, Professor of Modern Literature and Culture, with the Department of English and Drama, at Loughborough University, is author and editor of more than forty books. His most recent publications are Thomas Hardy (Palgrave) andLiterature, in Theory: Tropes, Subjectivities, Responses, and Responsibilities (Continuum). He is currently working on a study of the representation of London in the novels and journalism of Charles Dickens, and The Derrida Wordbook, both for Edinburgh. He is also editing, for Palgrave, The Literary Studies Companion.