England My England

Downton Abbey has brought out the Anglophile in American fans of the hit TV series. But Anglophilia has a long history in America. Why are some native-born residents of our Shining City Upon a Hill, where All Men Are Created Equal, seduced by the fluting tones of manor-born privilege? At last, Anglophilia explained---in American, thank you.


"England My England explores with Dery's customary forensic analysis and Menckenesque wit…his adolescence as an outsider, looking in with a mixture of horror and disdain at the banality of contemporary American culture, which he suffered as a small-town kid with a hungry intellect who found solace in subversive aspects of Englishness. Dery uses his personal experiences as microcosmic takes on the larger questions of American life, showing how the individual and the wider culture make each other. This isn’t some mere writer’s shtick but a technique for structuring cultural criticism in a way that is relevant to the reader. It is a discursive form that blends the pleasures of evocatively written memoir with the intellectual zing of sharply observed analysis." – Jim Lawrence, Brain Bubbles