Brexlit: British Literature and the European Project

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Britains vote to leave the European Union in the summer of 2016 came as a shock to many observers. But writers had long been exploring anxieties and fractures in British society from Euroscepticism, to immigration, to devolution, to post-truth narratives that came to the fore in the Brexit campaign and its aftermath. Reading these tensions back into contemporary British writing, Kristian Shaw coins the term Brexlit to deliver the first in-depth study of how writers engaged with these issues before and after the referendum result. Examining the work of over a hundred British authors, including Julian Barnes, Jonathan Coe, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ali Smith, as well as popular fiction by Andrew Marr and Stanley Johnson, Brexlit explores how a new and urgent genre of post-Brexit fiction is beginning to emerge.

Reviews

Brexlit is as much a well-researched book about Britain in Europe (from a political, institutional, economic and social perspective) as an extensive study of British literature and the European project from the mid-twentieth century to the present moment. The detailed developments on history and context are very useful for understanding the motivations for the Leave vote and the background to the novels, short stories, plays and poems examined. The book is a very solid contribution to the emerging field of Brexlit literature. * Cercles: revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone *
Brexlit is indispensable for anyone thinking about Britains contemporary literature and politics. Shaw tracks the marginal, at first, and then central issues of Europe and national identity through Eurosceptic fictions, representations of Englishness, devolution, migration and responses to Brexit. Lucidly written with astute, insightful critical analyses and an outstanding grasp of the political context, this is the best literary guide to Brexitland. * Robert Eaglestone, Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought, Royal Holloway, University of London *

Author Bio

Kristian Shaw is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Lincoln, UK. He is the author of Cosmopolitanism in Twenty-First Century Fiction (2017).