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).

• Introduction1: Lisa Suckert, Imagining a nation in time: Theoretical perspectives on continuity, progress and nostalgiaI. Making sense of Britain’s Present: Continuities and loss2. Kerstin Maria Pahl, Emotional styles and civilisational differences: Reimagining Britain through the Iberian Peninsula3. Jessica Fagin, The story did not end here: Narrative imagination and nationhood in England’s sheep slaughterhouses4. Rainer Emig, Detecting the nation in the margins: Images of Britain in regional crime TVII. Making sense of Britain’s Past: Nostalgia and guilt5. 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 Britain6. Julia Wiedemann, Dreams of the Anglo-Saxon village: Retrotopian visions of community in British literature of the nineteenth and twenty-first centuries7. Robert Clark, Don’t apologise: Brexit Britain’s imperial amnesia8. Christy Kulz, (Re)imagining Britain from Berlin: Working-class British migrants, social mobility and memoryIII. Making sense of Britain’s future: Promises and anxieties9. Grischka Petri, Looking back in anger: The impact and effects of branding Britishness in the arts since the YBAs10. Richard Toye, The entry of “Britishness” into high politics, 1997-200011. Dennis Henneböhl and Merle Tönnies, Instrumentalising national identity and shifting temporalities in British political rhetoric from the early 2020s: Imagining national futures