The Brexit within: Mapping the rural and the urban in contemporary British fiction

ABSTRACT

Just as the 2016 referendum results had spiralled into a full-blown crisis, it became increasingly clear that Britain’s push to leave the European Union (EU) concealed another crisis: a “Brexit within”. This term refers to the entries, exits, and enclosures that course through a dominant narrative of English national identity: countryside versus city life. Drawing on Raymond Williams’s The Country and the City (1973), this article argues that the rural and the urban serve as a template to diagnose other forms of division in Britain – racial, social, cultural, and economic – that the Brexit vote brought to the fore. The reading is based on two works of fiction published in the immediate aftermath of the referendum: Ali Smith’s Autumn (2016) and Amanda Craig’s The Lie of the Land (2017). Both narratives continue a larger literary tradition of Condition-of-England novels, as they map out new sites of marginalization and precarity in the post-imperial nation.

KEYWORDS:

• Rural and urban
• contemporary British fiction
• Condition-of-England novels
• Raymond Williams
• Ali Smith
• Amanda Craig

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. See, for instance, Ged Pope’s (2015) study on suburban London and also Simon Joyce’s (2007) analysis on how Zadie Smith’s writings show “a recognizable stylistic inheritance from Dickens” which is “overlaid onto a postcolonial politics [ ... ] to foreground the repressed connections between Britain and its imperial possessions” (141). Smith herself considers Dickens an early influence on how she grew into the idea of becoming a novelist. Dickens, she recounts in a recent essay, “had a name for his condition: novelist. Early in my life, this became my cover story, too” (Smith 2019, n.p.).

2. It is nevertheless important to note here that, only one year prior to the referendum, an EU survey revealed that regional inequality in the UK – in terms of average household income – is the worst in Western Europe (Inequality Briefing 2015, n.p.).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Birte Heidemann

Birte Heidemann is Assistant Professor of English Literature at Dresden University of Technology, Germany. Her most recent publications include Post-Agreement Northern Irish Literature (Palgrave, 2016) and the co-edited collection Violence in South Asia: Contemporary Perspectives (Routledge, 2019). Her work has appeared in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Wasafiri, and Postcolonial Text, among others.