‘Wel gelun a gud?’: Thomas Sheridan's Brave Irishman and the failure of English

Scholarship on Thomas Sheridan's popular farce The Brave Irishman has to date focused on its engagement with the figure of the ‘stage Irishman’, testing the title character's thick accent and Irish idiom against a standard English that rarely appears in the play itself. This essay considers the farce on broader terms, addressing both regional variations in the play's performance and the other idioms of the play, in order to argue that the farce overturns the devaluing of the Irish idiom and instead dramatises the shortcomings of English on terms consistent with Sheridan's large body of writing on the English language as spoken in the British Isles.     

Race and Civil Rights in the Contemporary Era

Paul M. Sniderman and Edward G. Carmines, Reaching Beyond Race
Brian K. Landsberg, Enforcing Civil Rights: Race Discrimination and the Department of Justice
Robert C. Smith, Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era: Now You See It, Now You Don't     

Faith in China: religious belief and national narratives amongst young,urban Chinese Protestants

This paper investigates the national narratives of young, urban Protestants in contemporary China. Based on 100 interviews conducted in Beijing and Shenzhen, it argues that in constructing their national narratives, Chinese Protestants display critical selectivity in adopting the values of official party‐state nationalism. They display affection towards China, a sense of responsibility for improving the country and a concern for society's morality, all of which echo official nationalist priorities. However, they are critical of China's political arrangements, dispute the primacy of economic growth and are less hawkish on international and territorial issues. They see no contradiction between their Protestant and Chinese identities, but generally prioritise the former. This selectivity is explained by the fact that Protestantism generally attracts those less satisfied by the social and political status quo, and because of, in Carlson's terms, the ‘boundary‐spanning’ nature of the Protestant identity and morality to which these converts then subscribe.     

The mobilisation of identities: a study on the relationship between elite rhetoric and public opinion on national identity in developed democracies

Over the last decade, the topic of national‐identity has gained considerable importance after various heads of states have made it an important political issue in the context of ongoing globalisation and European integration processes. There is also a large, mainly historical literature that has emphasised the role of the political elite in the formation of national‐identities. While this argument is widely discussed in both public and academic debates, there is, surprisingly, hardly any empirical research on this issue. We do not know whether elite positions resonate with how the masses think about these issues. We therefore set out to test this relationship by combining the 2003 wave of the International Social Survey Programme and content analysis of elite mobilisation rhetoric from the Comparative Manifesto Project. Results indicate that an overlap exists between politicians' articulation of exclusive notions about the contours of national‐identity and heightened expressions of civic and ethnic national‐identity within public opinion. By contrast, elite mobilisation along more inclusive lines appears ineffective. From this, it appears that exclusionary arguments play a more important role, at least in terms of attitudes about national‐identity, than inclusionary ones.