The contemporary British society is a multi-cultural society in that its members consist of diverse races with various religions, professions, and educational backgrounds. The national identity is supposed to serve as a centripetal pivot by bringing together diverse people under the same banner. So-called “Englishness” which aims to unify the modern English society can be in this sense regarded as a kind of the national identity. Such “Englishness”, however, is not a characteristic inherent in the British society, but a social construct, which is created to give the English people an illusion of England as a unified country. A belief in a British history is instrumental in creating such an illusion of Englishness, while suppressing diversities of the English society. A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes which has been regarded as an imperial text or a post-colonial text reveals the function of a history in creating the illusion of Englishness. While exploring the role of the historical description, the work describes how historical facts are distorted and reinterpreted, and how arbitrary elements and fictions are introduced to create the myth of Englishness. A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, which introduces fable, allegories, and hyper-reality, is basically a historiographic metafiction which is concerned with expose of the illusion of Englishness. While focusing on the metafictional aspects of the British history/ Englishness, Barnes reveals the arbitrary and artificial nature of historical description/history as well as the mythic character of Englishness, which is “invented” by the British imperial ideology to stress the superiority of the British. A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters is, in this sense, a typical literary work which effectively reveals the inextricable relationship between an ideology and a “history”/historical description.
Keywords: Englishness, History, Myth.