Brexit and Literature: Critical and Cultural Responses

by Robert Eaglestone (editor)

Brexit is a political, economic and administrative and it is a cultural one, too. In Brexit and Literature , Robert Eaglestone brings together a diverse range of literary scholars, writers and poets to respond to this aspect of Brexit. The discipline of ‘English’, as the very name suggests, is concerned with cultural and national literary studies has always addressed ideas of nationalism and the wider political process. With the ramifications of Brexit expected to last for decades to come, Brexit and Literature offers the first academic study of its impact on and through the humanities. Including a preface from Baroness Young of Hornsey, Brexit and Literature is a bold and unapologetic volume, focusing on the immediate effects of the divisive referendum while meditating on its long-term impact.

238 pages, Paperback

Published March 14, 2018

About the author

Robert Eaglestone (born 1968) is a British academic and writer. He is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought in the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London. He works on contemporary literature, literary theory and contemporary European philosophy, and on Holocaust and Genocide studies.

His work explores how literature ‘thinks’, especially in relation to issues of ethics. This was the subject of his first book, Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas, on literary theory and the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. This focus on ethics broadened to a concern with ethical relationships to the past, centrally the Holocaust, other genocides and atrocities, in The Holocaust and the Postmodern. His work draws on memory studies and trauma studies, as well as on the thought of Jacques Derrida and Hannah Arendt.

He works widely on contemporary literature, including Salman Rushdie and J. M. Coetzee and is the author of Contemporary Literature: A Very Short Introduction. In that book he writes:

Literature thinks. Literature is where ideas are investigated, lived out, explored in all their messy complexity… Perhaps… ‘think’ is not the right word: ‘think’ is too limiting a description of the range of what a novel can do with ideas. In any event, the way literature thinks is bound up with what it’s like to be us, to be human. Literature is how we make ourselves intelligible to ourselves. And contemporary fiction matters because it is how we work out who we are now, today.

He is also concerned with the teaching of literature, and has written the text book Doing English, a Guide for Literature Students; edits a series of books introducing major thinkers, Routledge Critical Thinkers, and is a commentator in the national press on literature teaching at school and in Higher Education.

He lives in Brixton, London, and has two children.

Reviews

[Jamilla Smith-Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

Originally started reading this for my Masters’, but ended up going on a different tangent so this book became irrelevant to that particular essay. Nevertheless, being the stubborn completionist that I am, I still wanted to finish this short collection. And rightly so; it’s a very enjoyable, insightful, accessible read. I struggled with one or two of the essays here - I am not a literature student after all - but their relevance to and within Brexit and culture discourse is still more than apparent.

Standouts include ‘Do novels tell us how to vote’ by Sara Upstone, ‘Fake news literary criticism’ by J. A. Smith, ‘Brexit and the imagination’ by Gabriel Josipovici’ and in particular ‘The lost nomad of Europe’ by Eva Aldea.

Worth reading if the topic interests you - the impact and role of culture within this point of history is severely under-researched. Yet it is of great importance in trying to understand ‘the people’, as attempted by so many literature and political science scholars alike.

RIP Jo Cox. Let us never forget.

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

This little book contains a dozen or more critical approaches to understanding Brexit’s relationship to literature and culture, and I appreciate the sheer range and density of ideas here. Because the chapters are pretty short, many of them feel like the kernels of much larger projects. Many of the writers incorporated their own narratives and educational histories, and that, along with the publication timing (within 1.5 years of the referendum), infuses the arguments and reflections with immediacy and urgency. Our collective focus on the pandemic and political instability in the US overshadowed coverage of Brexit’s finalization in December 2020, and it’s amazing how quickly the intensity of feeling / calls for action rising in response to the UK leaving the EU (like the collective expression in this collection) feels like it’s from a long-passed historical moment.

(There's a lot of future-of-the-university stuff in here--a surprise but really engaging.)

[Tommi · Rating 3 out of 5]

[3.5, to be reviewed]

[Annebeth Hollevoet · Rating 4 out of 5]

Nou, deze moest ik dus verplicht lezen voor den thesis, maar wel heel interessant!