First published in 1986, Patriotisms vividly describes the variety of patriotic styles and ideas that were actively at work in Britain from the Boer War to World War II, and in doing so, presents a fresh interpretation of the political history of the period. The author describes the teaching of patriotism in Edwardian England and the ethnic and institutional bases of English/British patriotisms. He discusses the patriae of ‘public poets’ such as Kipling and Newbolt, the ‘private’ patriotisms of the Georgian poets and other literary figures, and the polemics of Chesterton and Belloc. Also evaluated are the mind and spirit of British Imperial activism in the world and the responses of ‘Little England’ critics to it.
Other topics covered include Imperial statesmanship from Cromer to Chamberlain; patriotic persuasions old and new before 1914 and their recession between the wars; the development of certain antipatriotic states of mind; ‘Bloomsbury’ and the patria; the eclipse or transformation of ‘public poetry’ and the patriotism of the Labour Movement. Grainger also identifies the active patriots of the inter-war years, with particular reference to such leading politicians as Stanley Baldwin, L.S. Amery, Winston Churchill and Oswald Mosley.