Moodle.UP

The state-of-the-nation novel is a name given to a specifically British type of political prose narrative, modelled on a certain strand of Victorian novels – most notably, works by Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell and Anthony Trollope – and generally featuring a complex constellation of various characters in an urban setting, typically conveying a modern sense of alienation and moral confusion. While one might dismiss this traditional approach to probing into the structure of feeling of a nation at a specific time (including its political elites and the larger society) as somewhat dated and overcome, the state-of-the-nation novel has had a recent revival with the so-called Brexit Fiction associated with writers like Jonathan Coe, Anthony Cartwright, Ali Smith and Amanda Craig.

This course will look at the state-of-the-nation novel in various historical contexts, paying special attention to its most recent figuration after the Brexit referendum. A general question will be how this national approach to literature writing can nonetheless be understood as a kind of world literature engaging with the effects of globalisation.