With Robert Eaglestone (Royal Holloway, University of London), Anne Varty (Royal Holloway, University of London), Timothy Baker (University of Aberdeen), David Wheatley (University of Aberdeen), Patrick McGuiness (University of Oxford).
The Brexit vote, we know, has exposed multiple fault lines, geographical, social, economic and cultural that divide the country between North and South, between rural or post-industrial hinterland and London’s neo-liberal financial heartland, between a nostalgic longing for an Imperial British identity and a desire to embrace new forms of cosmopolitanism, between a so-called elite of specialists and the voice of the people. Brexit and Literature: Critical and Cultural Responses (2018), a collection of essays edited by Robert and dedicated to MP Jo Cox, has compellingly shown how the Brexit vote has brought along new forms of violence as it stemmed from a renewed anti-intellectual sentiment among Brexiters, the generalization of lies, and a deliberate abolition of the capacity to think among voters.
Five years after the vote and an eleventh-hour deal that is bound to dissatisfy both Leavers and Remainers, divisions remain and new questions arise. Violence has continued to pervade political rhetoric, all the more mendacious for being insidious. This would correspond to what Lindsey Stonebridge has coined the ‘Banality of Brexit’, an expression coined after Arendt’s notion of the ‘banality of evil’, i.e., the notion that evil spreads because it is ‘thought-defying’: it cannot be submitted to rational critique because of rampant confusion between fact and fabrication. This was first to be seen in the tautological rhetoric and repetitious speeches – famously ‘Brexit is Brexit’. But violence has also taken the form of an unprecedented assault on democratic institutions with the threat of proroguing Parliament or breaching international treatises, to cite the most obvious examples.
As political factions can’t agree, even on facts, pressing questions arise. How will the vote be remembered or commemorated? What narrative can make sense of it without creating further divide? On the 31st of the January 2020, the Poet Laureate, normally expected to pen poetry for national events, remained silent. Nevertheless, there has been a wealth of literary production broaching the topic, ranging from the traditional polyphonic novel such as Jonathan Coe’s Middle England, the political satire with Ian MacEwan’s The Cockroach or Carol Ann Duffy’s innovative form of documentary theatre My country, to name only a few. This round table aims to explore how the fragmentation of the United Kingdom in the aftermath of Brexit is reflected by writers from the four nations, England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales.
