Received: 15 February 2021      Revised: 28 July 2021      Accepted: 11 August 2021

DOI: 10.1111/spc3.12641

RESEARCH ARTICLE

Generational identities: Historical and literary

perspectives

Helen Kingstone

School of Literature and Languages, University

of Surrey, Guildford, Surrey, UK Abstract
Discussions of generational identities need to take into ac-
Correspondence
count their long and non-linear history. Our present focus
Helen Kingstone, Stag Hill, Guildford, Surrey,
GU2 7XH, UK. on intergenerational inequity Baby-Boomers vs. Millenni-
Email: [email protected]
als disregards the much more complex history of this social
Funding information identity. This paper by a historian and literary scholar teases
Wellcome Trust
apart (1) the diachronic and synchronic meanings of ‘gener-
ation’, (2) the difference between ‘a generation in itself’ from
‘a generation for itself’ that has a social identity, and (3) gen-
erational identities that are claimed from within or ascribed
from without. This paper places the question of how gener-
ational change takes place into historical context, showing
that while generational identities came to focused attention
during the First World War, they arguably began a century
earlier, in the upheavals of the French Revolution and world-
wide Napoleonic Wars. Nineteenth-century intellectual
movements were often generation-conscious, though these
identities did not translate across the social spectrum. The
paper emphasises the intersectional nature of any genera-
tional taxonomy in relation to class, gender, race and nation-
al context, drawing brief examples from independence-era
Jamaica, post-Soviet Russia, and mid-twentieth-century UK
and USA. A final section highlights the value of ‘intergenera-
tional’ approaches over those that emphasize a ‘generation
gap’.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and repro-
duction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
© 2021 The Authors. Social and Personality Psychology Compass published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

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2 of 10 KINGSTONE

1 | INTRODUCTION

Discussions of generational identities need to take into account their long and non-linear history. Our present focus on
intergenerational inequity (‘Baby-Boomers vs. Millennials’) disregards the much more extended and complex history
of this social identity. Some aspects are older–and others newer–than we might think.
The idea of ‘generations’ is hugely overused in the media at present, bandied around by journalists and poli-
cy-makers in senses that would be better served by alternative phrases such as life stage (e.g., ‘younger and older
people’), age group (e.g., ‘60-65 year-olds’), cohort (e.g., ‘the Class of 1966’) or even time period (e.g., ‘a once-in-a-gen-
eration vote’). However, even when we shed all these extraneous usages, ‘generations’ is still a complex term. The
concept is a double-faceted one that points both diachronically and synchronically (Burnett, 2010, pp. 1–2), or as we
might visualise it, both vertically and laterally. The term's most longstanding meaning relates to ‘generation’ of new life
(Hopwood et al., 2018), and points vertically up/down to other generations in a family. Over the past two centuries a
second meaning has developed, which instead points laterally outwards, and refers to contemporaries in the same co-
hort strata who have lived through shared historical experiences at the same approximate age. The concept of gener-
ations therefore has significance both within the family (vertically) and across society (laterally). The familial meaning
evokes the steady passing of time (think of the Bible's listing of the generations passing between Abraham and Jesus,
Matthew 1:1-17), whereas the socio-historical lateral meaning implies a temporal rupture or break with the past. Gen-
erational identities are typically both defined in comparison to notional parents and highly historically specific.
This article delineates the historical background to generational identities, and traces how they have been ad-
dressed in the humanities, particularly in historical and literary studies (my two home disciplines). History gives us a
much-needed long view, and literary studies specialises in close attention to language and its implicit implications, via
which generational identifications are often expressed. This article works from the premise that psychologists work-
ing in this area could benefit from a historically informed perspective. The paper argues that some of our received no-
tions about the limitations of generational identities (that they are recent and middle-class) are focused in the wrong
direction. Contemporary manifestations of generational issues are not their first or only iteration, and recognising this
can both prevent undue presentism or false uniqueness bias, and make us understand the concept differently. The arti-
cle does not seek to defend or prove the validity of the generations concept, but to show when and why commentators
have considered the concept to have validity. Showcasing some precursors and alternatives to Psychology's current
models can add valuable nuance—and potential new lines of enquiry—to those models.

2 | GENERATIONAL IDENTITIES BEFORE THE ‘BABY-BOOMERS’

The current political and media fascination with generational ingroup and outgroup identities may be particularly in-
tensive, but it is not new or unique. Generational identities came to focused attention from the end of the First World
War. Culturally influential divisions developed between the middle-aged generation who commanded the army and
the ‘Lost Generation’ in their 20s and 30s whose lives were shattered by it (Wohl, 1979). These were followed by a
further generation, coming of age just after war's 1918 end, who turned away from it completely (Erll, 2014). Vera
Brittain, part of that ‘Lost Generation’, served during the war as a volunteer nurse and then returned to her disrupt-
ed Oxford University degree in 1919. She recounts in her autobiography Testament of Youth (1933) how for the new
generation of fresh-faced 18-year-old fellow students, ‘I represented neither a respect-worthy volunteer in a national
cause nor a surviving victim of history's cruellest catastrophe; I was merely a figure of fun, ludicrously boasting of her
experiences in an already démodé conflict.’ (Brittain, 1978, p. 493) She recalls with particular intensity her sense of al-
ienation from this only slightly-younger but starkly demarcated generation. The term ‘generation gap’ was not coined
until the 1960s—to showcase the gulf in values between young ‘baby-boomers’ and their parents—but its dimensions
were first articulated in the aftermath of the First World War.
KINGSTONE 3 of 10

Generational identities also arguably extend backwards over a century beyond the First World War, to the French
Revolution and Napoleonic Wars (1789–1815), so scholars' understanding needs to address at least the past two cen-
turies. This chronology of generational identity was first propounded by founding sociologist of knowledge Karl Man-
nheim. He wrote in the aftermath of the First World War in Germany, and in an essay of 1927, he influentially argued
that generations emerge based on the socially transformative events that take place during people's adolescence and
early adulthood, what he called the ‘formative period’ (Mannheim, 1952). Times of historical upheaval are therefore
particularly conducive to development of strong generational identities, and Mannheim suggested that generational
identities first came into being in the turmoil of the late-eighteenth-century Age of Revolutions. The French revo-
lutionaries themselves were part of a tight cohort generation, with many of the most influential figures (including
Maximilien Robespierre and Georges Danton) aged only 20–25 when the revolution broke out (Nora, 1996). Later
scholarship has tended to support but nuance Mannheim's theory of the formative period: for example, Stewart and
Healy's study of different generational cohorts of mid-20th-century US women indicates that significant historical
events (including the Depression, the Second World War, 1950s pressure for women to return to the home, or the
1970s Women's Liberation Movement) have different types of effects depending on the person's age at the time. Their
resultant taxonomy suggests that events in our childhood or early teens impacts our fundamental values; those in
early adulthood shape our opportunities and life choices, thus also our identity; those we experience as a mature adult
shape our behaviour; those in later adulthood may lead to new pressures or choices, potentially leading to a revised
identity (Stewart & Healy, 1989, p. 32). This four-part taxonomy useful nuances Mannheim's narrow focus on early
adulthood, but also reinforces that life-stage's significance.
Mannheim valuably teased apart three levels of affiliation. The first is common generational ‘location’ or situation,
which the German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831, a member of the revolution-era generation who personally
witnessed one of Napoleon's triumphs) would call a generation ‘in itself’. Some later theorists have instead reclassified
‘generational location’ as ‘cohort’, indicating that it is solely defined by chronology and does not necessarily develop
a generational identity (Burnett, 2010, p. 48). The second level is, by contrast, a generation-conscious ‘generation in
actuality’, which Hegel would term a generation ‘for itself’, and which Mannheim defines as ‘a concrete bond […] cre-
ated between members of a generation by their being exposed to the social and intellectual symptoms of a process of
dynamic de-stabilisation.’ (Mannheim, 1952, p. 303). The third and final of Mannheim's levels of delineation reminds us
that being part of the same generation does not automatically produce homogeneity or even consensus. What Mann-
heim calls ‘generation units’ are the sub-groups that form as different people make contrasting responses (e.g., ‘liberal
or conservative’, p. 307) to the same issues.
The revolutionary period onward saw the emergence of generational artistic, creative and literary movements.
Literary scholars (Bloom, 1973; Bradshaw, 2018) refer to first- and second-generation British Romantic writers (the
first came of age with the French Revolution, the second 20–25 years later). When first-generation Romantic poet
William Wordsworth says of the revolution that ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive’, equally important is the next
line: ‘And to be young was very heaven’. However, it is worth acknowledging that many of these generational labels
refer to relatively small close-knit and privileged intellectual groups (such as various nineteenth-century artistic
‘brotherhoods’ of contemporaries, the Spanish modernist literary ‘Generation of [18]98’, or the ‘Auden Generation’ of
1930s British poets). What is more, while some of these generational labels were chosen by the group itself (e.g., the
‘Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’ of painters founded in 1848 by seven 19–23 year-olds), those applied to all the other
groups listed here were only applied retrospectively. The Spanish ‘Generation of 98’, for example, were shaped in their
youth by the Spanish-American War, but were only christened thus 15 years later (Hentea, 2013).
How early, then, did generational identities manifest beyond narrow coteries? Shifting now from literature re-
view to showcasing a particular case-study, I will briefly outline some of the results of a recent collaborative project,
co-led by Trev Broughton and me, entitled ‘Born 1819’. This examined the cohort of Queen Victoria's exact contem-
poraries, who were all born in 1819 and thus had bicentenaries in 2019 (Kingstone & Broughton, 2019a, 2019b).
The term ‘generational identity’ was not current at the time (‘identity’ then mainly referred to sameness), but we
found some notable generational consciousness among this cohort. For example, the great novelist George Eliot
4 of 10 KINGSTONE

(pen-name of Marian Evans; 1819–1880) resisted identification with her peer-group as she fled from ‘provincial’
familial expectations to cosmopolitan London literary life (Livesey, 2019, p. 288), but she later repeatedly depicted
her the lost world of her childhood in novels including Middlemarch: a Study of Provincial Life (1871–1872), set in
1829–1832. What is more, she shared this sense of rupture with many of her contemporaries. This was the gener-
ation who most painfully experienced crises of religious faith. The historian James Anthony Froude (1818–1894)
wrote in his later years that ‘the present [i.e. younger] generation, which has grown up in an open spiritual ocean, […]
will never know what it was to find the lights all drifting, the compasses all awry, and nothing left to steer by except
the stars.’ (Qtd. Hewitt, 2019, p. 437).
The ‘Born 1819’ project found that generational consciousness was prominent among intellectual movements,
though less so across the population as a whole. Those young people did not grow up with the institutional cohort
structures (e.g., schooling or military service) that seem to be necessary—though not by themselves sufficient—for
the development of generations. While Mannheim credits the French Revolution for initiating generational identi-
ties at the turn of the nineteenth century, we might also attribute it to the Industrial Revolution and state centrali-
sation. The Napoleonic Wars saw high levels of conscription on the European continent (England relied instead on a
combination of volunteers and press-ganging), and the later nineteenth century saw state schooling established in
much of western Europe and the USA. Cohorts as defined by institutions are much narrower than socio-historical
generations (e.g., single year-group intakes), but clusters of educational cohorts can go on to develop generational
identities (Burnett, 2010, p. 48). As I found in my contribution to the project (a corpus linguistic analysis of accounts
of this cohort's lives in the Dictionary of National Biography (1885–1901) shortly after their deaths), generational
consciousness was more common among generation units of male contemporaries—who had studied together at
school or university—than among their female counterparts barred from these institutions (Kingstone, 2019, pp.
464–465).
However, a new line of thinking by one historian of the project suggests that the nineteenth century saw wide-
spread generations ‘in themselves’ (to use the Hegelian terminology) even if not self-consciously ‘for themselves’. If
so, we can usefully apply generational taxonomies to the nineteenth century without having to presume or require
widespread generational consciousness. Martin Hewitt suggests that we can see generational patterning in the
way that Darwinism took hold from 1859 onwards (Hewitt, forthcoming). Darwin's theory of evolution drew on
existing ideas but combined them in a new and shockingly impersonal mechanism of ‘natural selection’. Its princi-
ple of transformation over time also challenged Biblical ideas of continuous linear descent (see Burnett, 2010, pp.
30–31). Hewitt analyses a substantial corpus of linguistic evidence from nineteenth-century periodicals, newspa-
pers, surviving correspondence and the records of scientific societies to show that rather than people gradually be-
coming reconciled to this theory, responses quickly crystallized along generational lines. People born before 1830,
who were already past their ‘formative period’ when On the Origin of Species (1859) came out, did not or could not
overhaul their worldview. Those currently in their prime, including the born-1819 cohort, were daunted but felt
an obligation to engage, and a ‘rising generation’ of those under 30 years old became Darwinism's most zealous
proponents. Public opinion only shifted as the generation for whom Darwin's ideas were formative rose to promi-
nence. These findings also support Stewart and Healy's four-part taxonomy over Manheim's emphasis on a single
‘formative period’.
Hewitt's findings raise a question about whether we define socio-historical generations specifically as conscious
collectives, or simply as groups with shared situations. Mannheim's analysis included unself-conscious cohort gener-
ations (a group ‘in itself’, in Hegel's terms), as does Hewitt's here. By contrast, most modern focus on socio-historical
generations attends to self-conscious generational identities (a group ‘for itself’), suggesting that ‘a generation exists
when it thinks it does.’ (Hynes, 1990, p. 383) Hewitt's study opens up the possibility that unconscious generational
patterning can exist prior to, or even without, conscious generational identities. In the twenty-first century, when
generational labels are widely used but not universally embraced, that might suggest that even those people born
c. 1981-1996 who reject (or are oblivious to) the ‘Millennial’ designation may in some structural characteristics or
behaviours align with the generational stereotype.
KINGSTONE 5 of 10

3 | HOW DOES GENERATIONAL CHANGE TAKE PLACE?

The ‘paradigm shift’ (Kuhn, 1962) involved in acceptance of Darwin's theories may therefore have taken place not
through the changing of minds but through gradual generational supersession. Sociologists have similarly debated
how—and if—people change their minds. Does cultural change take place through people revising their views or
through cohort replacement? Kevin Kiley and Stephen Vaisey describe this debate as being between an ‘active up-
dating model’ and a ‘settled dispositions model’, the latter being an heir to Mannheim (Kiley & Vaisey, 2020). They find
that younger people change their minds in long-lasting ways more than older people. Individuals are also more likely
to change their minds about salient or topical issues such as same-sex marriage, or church attendance, rather than
core private attitudes such as religious belief. Via generational theory, they thus offer a middle line between what we
might characterise as Social Psychology's focus on situational determinants and Personality Psychology's emphasis on
the determinative power of stable dispositions. Kiley and Vaisey's findings align surprisingly closely with Mannheim's
model of a generation's formative period followed by distinctive self-definition.
We can tentatively translate the model of generational overlap and supersession to other times and places. As
Mannheim writes (but does not quite put into practice in his own resultant theory), ‘every moment in time [… has] more
than one dimension, because it is always experienced by several different generations at various stages of develop-
ment.’ (Mannheim, 1952, p. 283) For the Jamaican generation born in the 1930s who fought for their country's inde-
pendence, the elusive ideal of the ‘nation’ seemed boundless (Scott, 2014). For those born into comparatively greater
privilege in the 1940s, independence when it came in 1962 felt less like an achievement than a ‘betrayal’, leading them
to become part of the next radical ‘generation of 1968’. For those of a later generation like David Scott who grew up
in an already independent Jamaica, the nation was simply a means of ‘state power’ (Scott, 2014, p. 169). Similar ob-
servations have been made about the fall of the Soviet Union, as different generations have very different senses of
what was gained and lost in the transition (Prusik & Lewicka, 2016), and about post-Apartheid South Africa, where the
young generation of ‘Born Frees’ are struggling with persistent racial economic inequality and are often more disillu-
sioned than older generations about the status quo (Newman & De Lannoy, 2014).
Similarly in the USA, research by Howard Schuman and collaborators has shown that in contemporary American
questionnaires asking people to name significant historic events of the past 50 years, those who lived through the
Second World War saw it in terms of personal experience and as a time of suffering, whereas those in the younger
‘Vietnam War generation’ saw that earlier war in contrast as a ‘good war’ (Schuman & Corning, 2015; Schuman &
Scott, 1989). This demonstrates the power of collective memory and specifically of its long-term codified form, ‘cul-
tural memory’ (Assmann, 1995), since those with personal experience of WW2 who lived among an everyday, informal
‘communicative memory’ of its events saw it in less mythical terms than do younger generations.
21st-century experience suggests that generations may not solely be formed by their own members. Does the
‘identity’ emerge from within or without, from self-definition or from external labelling? In practice, the two processes
can happen simultaneously. ‘Millennials’ characterise themselves as hard-done-by in the competition for affordable
housing, non-precarious careers and a sustainable climate (Foundation for the Rights of Future Generations, n.d.),
and are characterised as such by some ‘baby-boomers’ themselves, as in former UK Conservative education minis-
ter David Willetts' The Pinch: how the baby boomers took their children's future–and why they should give it back (Wil-
letts, 2010). At the same time, they have been characterised from outside as a narcissistic but depressive ‘Generation
Me’ (Twenge, 2006, 2008). This interpretation is less convincing (though perhaps I should declare a conflict of interest
here, as a Millennial myself), due to Twenge's lack of reference to any specific historical trigger or demarcation point
from a previous generation. Her claim of rising individualism is countered by Wheeler et al.'s study of trends in twenti-
eth-century moral language, where using categories from Haidt and Joseph's ‘Moral Foundations Theory’, they found
that the ‘individualising’ foundations (‘harm’ and ‘fairness’) did not show an overall rise in usage, and moreover were
negatively correlated with each other (Haidt & Joseph, 2004; Wheeler et al., 2019, p. 9/12). Finally, it is important to
remember that generations can also acknowledge but dismiss or reject the stereotype they are assigned in the media,
as found in Burnett's (2003) study of ‘Thirtysomething’ Gen. X peer groups in the early 2000s.
6 of 10 KINGSTONE

4 | GENERATIONAL IDENTITIES AS INTERSECTIONAL

Generational identities always intersect with other identity markers and categories, including class, gender and race,
as well as national context (Bristow & Kingstone, 2021). Any taxonomy of generational identities will apply most con-
vincingly with respect to particular nation-states (Steele & Acuff, 2011). The post-Second World War ‘baby-boomers’
label, for example, now used across Anglo-American scholarship, applies demographically much more precisely to the
USA than the UK (Falkingham, 1997, pp. 19–21). In the UK, a second sharp peak of births in the 1960s produced a
‘second wave’ baby-boom whose members ‘never achieved’ a ‘stability of identity on a par with the first wave’ (Bur-
nett, 2010, p. 91; Elliott, 2013). This highlights part of what Jeffrey Arnett (2008) has shown to be a widespread and
distorting over-emphasis on American populations as subjects of study in Psychology. He gives several examples of
US norms that do not necessarily apply in the Global South, which also apply compellingly to generational identities.
For example, differences in family structures may well produce different generational formations: in ‘long families’ of
multiple children, ‘mezzanine’ generations emerge as older siblings take care of younger ones, challenging any clear-
cut parent/child binary (Davidoff, 2012). Similarly, American emphasis on peer influence in adolescence (du Bois-Rey-
mond & Ravesloot, 1996; Richards et al., 1998) is premised on a highly age-graded and comprehensive education sys-
tem (Arnett, 2008).
We could see this as a limitation of all such generational taxonomies. On the other hand, once we recognise that
generational identities (and social identities more broadly) are defined within what Liu and Hilton (2005) call different
national ‘charters’, we can consider the generational dynamics of each national context on its own terms, as we saw in
section 3 in relation to Jamaica, the USSR and South Africa. The important insight that identities are shaped by rep-
resentations of the national past has been pursued in depth within intellectual and cultural history (see White, 1973;
Bann, 1984) and Memory Studies (Halbwachs, 1980; Nora, 1989).
We also need to bear in mind that the characteristics associated with generational identities are class-specific
(Mannheim, 1952), with the result that elites often become the markers for, and are even conflated with, wider social
history. Those who are most generation-conscious tend to be members of intellectual and artistic movements, and
(as we saw in section 2) these are typically populated by the middle classes. More broadly, interest in identity and the
modern psychological self is also a primarily bourgeois concern (see Gagnier, 1991), as too are the participants of stud-
ies in social and personality psychology (Graham, 1992). The media stereotype of the privileged ‘boomer’, the entitled
Generation X ‘Karen’ figure, or the narcissistic ‘Millennial’, are often based on white middle-class stereotypes, but our
populations are much more diverse. The stereotypes are also of course based on partial versions of the truth: while
university education was indeed free for UK baby-boomers, there were only sufficient university places for a small
percentage of that generation (Bristow, 2015). Some historical generations, shaped by watershed moments, develop
among specific minority groups. Sometimes these can line up with mainstream generational taxonomies, as for the
‘Stonewall Generation’ of LGBTQ baby-boomers who came of age with the Stonewall Riots of 1969. In other cases,
however, the identity cuts across those taxonomies, as with the ‘Windrush Generation’, who arrived in the UK from the
Caribbean as both young adults and children between 1948 and 1971.
In a multi-generational study of Working and Caring over the Twentieth Century (2004), sociologist Julia Brannen
et al found that generational identities defined by historical events were (a) most potent among the working classes,
and (b) diminishing rather than growing in significance. The authors found that among their interviewees who grew
up during the 1930s Great Depression, working-class individuals saw their lives as shaped (even buffeted) by his-
torical circumstances, whereas the middle-class ones (whose families had had a financial buffer) mentioned those
circumstances much less. The authors also found that the younger generations they interviewed (women of the Ba-
by-boomer and Generation X generations) framed their life stories much more in terms of personal agency, choice,
and responsibility (Brannen et al., 2004, pp. 28–31, 45–46). The authors read this as part of a mid-century-onwards
‘psychologised’ reading of childhood (p. 34) though also as part of broader social trends towards ‘individualisation’,
implicitly propelled by recent decades' neoliberalism. However, the contrasts between these life narratives might
equally result from the fact that the historical circumstances of these younger women's lives are much chronologically
KINGSTONE 7 of 10

closer than those of their parents' or grandparents' youths. As a result, the younger women found it easier to see
these circumstances through the lens of personal ‘memory’ than as part of ‘history’ in a broader social or structural
sense.
Part of the appeal of the ‘generation gap’ term (as with generational identities more broadly) is its combined sense
that the problem it names is urgent and collective, as well as being a new manifestation of a perpetual cycle. However,
feminist writer Audré Lorde suggests that far from being liberating:

the ‘generation gap’ is an important social tool for any repressive society. If the younger members of a
community view the older members as contemptible or suspect or excess, they will never be able to join
hands and examine the living memories of the community, nor ask the all-important question, ‘Why?’
(Lorde, [1984] 2007, p. 117)

Lorde's warning is a valuable reminder that when generational identities lead to a sense of conflict over resourc-
es or even simply of incompatibility between generational groups, they can become socially and politically harmful.
This problem highlights the importance of inter-generational communication and understanding, not only at an eco-
nomic level (in such concepts as ‘intergenerational justice’) but at grass-roots and interpersonal level. A wealth of
applied work here demonstrates contemporary consciousness about this issue, as several third-sector organisations
(including United for All Ages [UK], Generations Working Together [Scotland], Together Old and Young [EU] and Gen-
erations United [USA]) are now pursuing intentional and deliberate intergenerational interventions. These include
programmes of activities that bring participants from different generations (and often intersectionally disparate com-
munities) together in a purposeful way where both age groups benefit. This approach is intended to help people see
both what they have in common, and what is valuable and unique about their own skills. Sometimes such initiatives
have focused primarily on the very old and very young (see Somers, 2019), but Generations Working Together for one
emphasises the need to work not only with the so-called ‘book-end’ generations but to facilitate intergenerational di-
alogue between all combinations of the 4–5 living generations. Measured impacts of such programmes have included
reduced ‘ageism and age discrimination among young and old alike’ and ‘greater sense of belonging and connectedness
with others of different ages.’ (Generations United, 2021, p. 7; Rubin et al., 2015; Burnes et al., 2019)
This new field of interventionist intergenerational practice, and its underpinnings in Psychology, currently risks
being hamstrung by an ahistorical concept of generation as phase of lifespan development. Studies and programmes
that bring different generations together based on assumptions about those groups' characteristics all too often con-
flate one concept with the other. One otherwise commendable recent conference paper put a positive spin on the
future challenges of an ageing society by referencing survey results that today's 70–74-year-olds are the most ‘satis-
fied’ age group (Brown Nicholls, 2021; Centre for Ageing Better, 2019, p. 12). Such inferences are not only prey to the
fallacy of all satisfaction surveys (given that satisfaction is calibrated against one's prior expectations), but moreover
assumes that the happiness level of today's 70-year-olds is a product of their life stage, rather than their socio-histor-
ical generational position as beneficiaries of the post-war welfare state and current retirement provision. As Kertzer
articulates, ‘we cannot attribute differences between people of different ages to their life-course position without
determining whether these differences stem instead from cohort characteristics.’ (Kertzer, 1983, p. 130) Intergenera-
tional practitioner and evaluator Ali Somers also suggests that these initiatives also need to take generational identi-
ties into account. She suggests that intergenerational engagement sometimes affirms, but also often contests, notions
of generational identity (Somers, forthcoming). The historical and political dimensions of the concept of generational
identities are integral to its use.
The extent to which generations are self-defined or defined from outside has inevitably varied over historical
time. As we have seen, Wordsworth experiencing the French Revolution in the 1790s was conscious that this was
particularly exciting for the ‘young’, but he did not have Mannheim's language in which to write about it in genera-
tional terms. By contrast, in the 21st century it is difficult to escape generational formulations. Within months of
the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, commentators began envisaging how the children and students blocked
8 of 10 KINGSTONE

from in-person education, who will enter the labour market in the pandemic's ensuing economic downturn, might
become ‘the Corona Generation’ (Bristow & Gilland, 2020). The longer view espoused by this paper would suggest
that each co-existing current generation has been affected by the pandemic in different but significant ways (Bristow
& Kingstone, 2021).

AC KNOW L E DGEME N T S
Thank you to Peter Hegarty for commissioning this piece and for his guidance and insights in helping me to produce
it. Grateful thanks for feedback from Jennie Bristow, Judith Burnett, Martin Hewitt and Nigel Williams, as also from
the two peer reviewers. Thanks to Ashton Applewhite for directing me to Audré Lorde's take on this question. The
research for this article was made possible by funding from the Wellcome Trust.

ORCID
Helen Kingstone https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1862-495X

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AU T H O R BIOGR A PH Y

Dr Helen Kingstone is a research fellow at the University of Surrey. She is author of Victorian Narratives of the
Recent Past: memory, history, fiction (Kingstone, 2017), and currently writing a book about the ways that nine-
teenth-century writers sought a sense of overview on their contemporary history. She co-leads a Wellcome
Trust-funded network on Generations: what's in the concept and how best should it be used?

How to cite this article: Kingstone, H. (2021). Generational identities: Historical and literary perspectives.
Social and Personality Psychology Compass, e12641. https://doi.org/10.1111/spc3.12641