ABSTRACT
By the 1990s, heritage had become an established fixture in Britain as evidenced by parliamentary legislation, national organizations, and the cultural legacy trope's widespread acceptance. Heritage's curricular sense, self-consciously identifying one's own culture as tutoring the nation's young in cultural citizenship, foregrounds its metacultural dimension as open transmission, one that cannot limit bequests and legatees. Downriver self-consciously addresses postmodernism, for the cultural dominant frames the novel's negotiation of heritage. Heritage, the purported past, is likewise subjected to contemporary and industrialized fashions devised by graduate juveniles determining fads for the new culture season. More than Downriver, inheritance explicitly orients Peter Ackroyd's English Music. Heritage in England, England enacts what critics of the 1980s and 1990s saw as postmodernism's unfortunate hegemony through commodification of the past, heritage's deployment as a national brand, and the nation's transformation into a market-driven retro-themed tourist trap.
