"Literature, Identity and the English Channel examines representations of the Channel in British and French literature from the French Revolution onwards. This is a timely subject given the intense debates in progress about the actual and desired relationships between Britain and mainland Europe. The book addresses a wide range of authors who have taken the Channel as a focus, from Charlotte Smith and Chateaubriand through Dickens, Swinburne and Hugo, writers of the First and Second World Wars, and historians and travel writers of the 1950s and 1960s, to postmodern fiction of the 1990s."--Jacket.