Letter
National Identity
9 May 1991
As a historian of ideas of national character, who is based in American Studies, I would like to comment on what Perry Anderson says about these ideas (LRB, 9 May). Anderson usefully illuminates the path of European contentions about national character up to the early 20th century, but he is quite wrong to assert that serious work on the subject ceased after the Twenties. He does not, it seems, confine...
