Slogans and Attitudes (The Image of the English Gentleman in Twentieth-Century Literature: Englishness and Nostalgia) (Book Review‪)‬

The Image of the English Gentleman in Twentieth-Century Literature: Englishness and Nostalgia, by Christine Berberich. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. 218 pp. $99.95. Reviewed by Jonathan Pitcher, Bennington College. Christine Berberich's revisionary salvage operation forms part of a recent penchant for recognizing the continued existence of a series of atavistic structures--Englishness, nostalgia, and chivalry among them -an apparently unforgiving morphology that, however marcescent, will just not go away. The tone here is palliative as opposed to venomous, an act of epigonal rehabilitation rather than a coup de grace, as the gentleman, through a definition of the term, his history, his literary history, and viable close readings of his survival in Siegfried Sassoon, Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh, and Kazuo Ishiguro, becomes the metonymic lens through which to view the contemporaneous English geist, the contiguities of national, class, and gender identity.