Brexit and Beyond: Nation and Identity

Daniela Keller, Ina Habermann, Daniela Keller, Ina Habermann

• Publisher: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9783823384144
• eBook ISBN:
  9783823394143
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

This volume explores the cultural significance of Brexit, situating it in debates about nation and identity. Contributors to this collection seek to contextualize Britain's decision to leave the EU and to assess its reverberations in language, literature, and culture. Addressing such aspects as British exceptionalism, myth-making, medievalism, and nostalgia, contributions range from travelogues, Ladybird books, and rural cinema-going to ageing. An important focus lies on marginalized groups and geographical fringes, as contributors attend to the Irish situation and the scarcity of EU migrants in Brexit literature (BrexLit). Finally, two essays widen the perspective to assess American parallels to the discourses about a Brexit that is still far from "done."

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• General Editor’s Preface
• Ina Habermann and Daniela Keller (Basel) - Introduction: In the Shallows of National Identity
• Matthias D. Berger (Bern) - 2016 and All That: Medievalism and Exceptionalism in Brexit Britain
• Barbara Straumann (Zurich) - Long Live the Queen! Queen Victoria as a National Icon in Film
• Martin Mik and Jo Angouri (Warwick) - “My Lords and Members of the House of Commons”: Britain and the European Integration Project through the Queen’s Speeches
• Nora Wenzl (Vienna) - “The United Kingdom is a different state”: Conservative MPs’ Appeals to Britishness before the EU Referendum
• Harald Pittel (Potsdam) - Ali Smith’s ‘Coming-of-Age’ in the Age of Brexit
• Michelle Witen (Flensburg) - The Story of Brexit: Nostalgia in Parody Children’s BrexLit
• Christine Berberich (Portsmouth) - BrexLit and the Marginalized Migrant
• Victoria Allen (Kiel) - Retracing, Remembering, Reckoning: Stuart Maconie’s Footsteps Narrative of the Jarrow March
• Ian Goode (Glasgow) - The Cultural Topography of Rural Cinema-Going in the Post-War Highlands and Islands of Scotland
• Maurice Fitzpatrick (Villanova) - Fractured Identities: How Brexit Threatens an Agreed Ireland
• Cécile Heim (Lausanne) - Unsettling Private Property in Linda Hogan’s Mean Spirit
• Shelley Fisher Fishkin (Stanford) - Nostalgia for a Fictive Past: Nation and Identity in a Post-Trump, Post-Brexit World
• Notes on Contributors
• Index of Names