Wessex - Cultural and Political Identity in Modern Times

Cultural and Political Identity in Modern Times

Further information: Thomas Hardy's Wessex

The English author Thomas Hardy used a fictionalised Wessex as a setting for many of his novels, adopting his friend William Barnes' term Wessex for their home county of Dorset and its neighbouring counties in the south and west of England. Hardy's Wessex excluded Devon, Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire, but the city of Oxford, which he called "Christminster", was visited as part of Wessex in Jude the Obscure. He gave each of his Wessex counties a fictionalised name, such as for Berkshire, which is known in the novels as "North Wessex".

A movement exists in south-central England which aims to create a new regional cultural and political identity for Wessex. The movement consists of three distinct but interlinked organisations: the Wessex Regionalist Party, a registered political party which contests elections; the Wessex Constitutional Convention, an all-party pressure group in which those who are sympathetic to devolution for Wessex but who are not members of the Wessex Regionalist Party can be represented; and the Wessex Society, which is a cultural society devoted to promoting the distinctive identity of the region, while remaining politically neutral. The Wessex Constitutional Convention and the Wessex Regionalist Party both do not believe that Cornwall should form part of a devolved Wessex region, the boundaries which remain unclear. Because it does not take a political position regarding devolution to a strictly defined territory, the Wessex Society can afford to assume a relaxed position about where exactly the boundaries of cultural Wessex lie. The Wessex Regionalists had used Hardy's definition of Wessex for their political Wessex Region, but today the party also includes Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire. In the 2010 UK General Election, the Wessex Regionalists contested the West Oxfordshire parliamentary seat of Witney. An eight county definition of Wessex has been criticised from a number of quarters. Some people regard Hardy's definition as correct on the grounds that the counties north of the Thames, along with Berkshire and north-east Somerset, were part of Mercia for much of the Anglo-Saxon period. Others would argue that such references to the Dark Ages are not relevant to a modern region defined by its geography.

The Wessex regionalist organisations justify their eight-shire definition of Wessex in terms both of modern regional geography and (less convincingly) early English history. They point to the impossibility of pleasing everyone as an argument against change to their definition of Wessex at the present time, though they do not rule out the possibility of change in the future if the popular will demands it.

Read more about this topic:  Wessex

Famous quotes containing the words cultural, political, identity, modern and/or times:

    “By Modernism I mean the positive rejection of the past and the blind belief in the process of change, in novelty for its own sake, in the idea that progress through time equates with cultural progress; in the cult of individuality, originality and self-expression.”
    —Dan Cruickshank (b. 1949)

    “Nationality is the miracle of political independence; race is the principle of physical analogy.”
    —Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)

    “One of the most highly valued functions of used parents these days is to be the villains of their children’s lives, the people the child blames for any shortcomings or disappointments. But if your identity comes from your parents’ failings, then you remain forever a member of the child generation, stuck and unable to move on to an adulthood in which you identify yourself in terms of what you do, not what has been done to you.”
    —Frank Pittman (20th century)

    “If you look at the 150 years of modern China’s history since the Opium Wars, then you can’t avoid the conclusion that the last 15 years are the best 15 years in China’s modern history.”
    —J. Stapleton Roy (b. 1935)

    “A sophistical rhetorician, inebriated with the exuberance of his own verbosity, and gifted with an egotistical imagination that can at all times command an interminable and inconsistent series of arguments to malign an opponent and to glorify himself.”
    —Benjamin Disraeli (1804–1881)