Abstract

In his novel England, England, Barnes imagines a grand Project that promises an authentically English experience offered by a small replica of England on the Isle of Wight, a reconstruction skilfully based on a list of Fifty Quintessences of Englishness. Guided by a strong belief that “we are the new pioneers, we must sell our past to other nations as their future” (Barnes, 2012: 40), the engineers of the Project exploit the necessity of replicating history and culture for business purposes. The paper explores some of these aspects, with a central interest in the concept of Englishness, that all-encompassing collection of identity markers unifying the English people, as it is satirically re-evaluated, reactivated, replicated, reconstructed and even reinvented by Barnes’ fictional work.