Fictions of Brexit: BrexLit and Imaginations of Britishness in the 21st Century

Even with negotiations still underway, one can already contend that the Brexit vote in 2016 has profoundly changed the political, social and cultural landscape in Britain. Not only British relations with Europe are affected, but Britain itself is deeply divided and undergoing severe transformations. The project ‘Fictions of Brexit’ discusses fictions – in the plurivalent sense of literary fiction and socio-cultural fictions that societies live by – of the British nation and notions of Britishness in the 21st Century. Fictions are thus conceived of as offering a specific repertoire of metaphors, images and plot structures that mediate experience and reveal cultural norms, categorizations, and values. Considering both cultural narratives and literary fictions, the project aims at shedding light on contemporary processes of re-imagining the British nation in times of uncertainty. In this regard, Yuvel Harari’s claim that fiction(s) might be the “most potent force” in our time and age (2016: 151) and the particular knowledge and singularity of literature (Attridge 2004/Locatelli 2012) will be drawn on to discuss the cultural work that fictions of Brexit engage in. Based on the assumption that “the first wave of post-Brexit fiction largely seems to be detailing the specific frailties and parochial trivialities of an insular and diminished small island” and “retain a narrow focus on British society and its isolation from the continent” (Shaw 2018: 27-28), the following questions will be raised: What are the socio-cultural functions fulfilled by BrexLit? In how far do fictions of Brexit engage in and spur identity formation processes and offer a site of negotiating Britishness? In what ways do they work to counter-balance intellectual isolation and dichotomic thinking? The project’s theoretical framework outlines the values of literature as well as the socio-cultural conditions for the emergence of societal divisions and Brexit, e.g. by discussing transformations of knowledge production in the 21st century, signified by filter bubbles (Pariser 2011), and by drawing on concepts of Britishness in relation to Islandology (Shell 2014, Deleuze 2012). Moreover, a diachronic perspective on British fictions’ engagement with Europe is provided on the basis of selected examples of the canon. The focus here is to trace the dynamics of common identity formation processes as carried out in literary representations of self and other. The main chapters of the book project consist of case studies of BrexLit which cover the genres of satire, dystopia, as well as condition-of-England novels and draw on British novels and short stories published roughly between the date of the vote in 2016 and about a year after Britain actually leaving the European Union.