Lisa Suckert is Professor for Social Theory and Cultural Sociology at the University of Antwerp (Belgium).
Merle Tönnies is Professor of English Literature and British Cultural Studies at Paderborn University (Germany).
Richard Toye is Professor of Modern British History at the University of Exeter (United Kingdom).

Introduction
1: Lisa Suckert, Imagining a nation in time: Theoretical perspectives on continuity, progress and nostalgia

I. Making sense of Britain’s Present: Continuities and loss
2. Kerstin Maria Pahl, Emotional styles and civilisational differences: Reimagining Britain through the Iberian Peninsula
3. Jessica Fagin, The story did not end here: Narrative imagination and nationhood in England’s sheep slaughterhouses
4. Rainer Emig, Detecting the nation in the margins: Images of Britain in regional crime TV

II. Making sense of Britain’s Past: Nostalgia and guilt
5. Siobhan O’Connor, “Built on an edifice of lies and monstrous brutality”: The Tudor world of C. J. Sansom’s Shardlake novels and the politics of Englishness in pre-Brexit Britain
6. Julia Wiedemann, Dreams of the Anglo-Saxon village: Retrotopian visions of community in British literature of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries
7. Robert Clark, Don’t apologise: Brexit Britain’s imperial amnesia
8. Christy Kulz, (Re)imagining Britain from Berlin: Working-class British migrants, social mobility and memory

III. Making sense of Britain’s future: Promises and anxieties
9. Grischka Petri, Looking back in anger: The impact and effects of branding Britishness in the arts since the YBAs
10. Richard Toye, The entry of “Britishness” into high politics, 1997-2000
11. Dennis Henneböhl and Merle Tönnies, Instrumentalising national identity and shifting temporalities in British political rhetoric from the early 2020s: Imagining national futures