Regional identity in late nineteenth-century England; discursive terrains and rhetorical strategies

Abstract

Regional identity and regionalist politics in contemporary England seem muted and indistinct when compared with some other European regions. It is therefore unsurprising that historians have failed to discover unambiguous regional identities in the past. However, this article investigates one possible exception in a case study of a peripheral English region. Adopting concepts of narrative, discourse and rhetoric, it examines the discursive moments and rhetorical strategies of spatial identity in nineteenth-century Cornwall. Evidence of a tentative regionalism is marshalled in order to reflect on the usefulness of social scientific approaches to discourse and rhetoric for understanding a specific place identity of late nineteenth-century England. While they provide a handy toolkit for the regional historian they also hint at the limits as well as the possibilities of applying discourse analysis to the past and require supplementing with the concepts of power and context.