Introduction

Heritage is a very British, or more precisely English, trope, a seemingly ubiquitous figure of speech grown into unconscious rhetorical tic, one used to describe myriad relationships with the past and its material, cultural, and political vestiges. One of heritage's strongest emotional components is the suggestion of continuities standing against an era of continuous change. If heritage intimates a sense of mortality, this derives from the fact legacies index change and transformation. Contemporary resonances of heritage can be made manifest through consideration of Rudyard Kipling's 1905 poem The Heritage, a text itself drawing from more than a century of refining the trope. Heritage is revealed to be a trope whose continuities and singularities conceal-or attempt to counterbalance-absolute loss and difference. Heritage is less an actual handing down of things from past to present and more a means of communicating group identity both to those within the group and to those outside.