Unfolding Ruptures: Brexlit and the Contemporary

In the frame of contemporary literature, one cannot but consider Brexit as a significant turning point in the development of literary responses to the present. Yet, far from being a single or isolated political event, Brexit quickly became a site where longstanding socio-cultural, economic, geopolitical or even personal issues intersected, thus provoking an array of well-known writers to add their (fictional) perspectives to the debate. For this reason, the present article attempts to illuminate the characteristics of Brexit literature, or ‘Brexlit’ (Shaw 2018; 2021), by contextualising it within the contested period of the early twenty-first century, which is often referred to as ‘the contemporary’. This includes a survey of key terms and definitions of the period, such as ‘metamodernism’ (Vermeulen & van den Akker 2010) or the ‘transglossic’ (Shaw & Upstone 2021), as well as an analysis of two important British examples of ‘Brexlit’: Jonathan Coe’s Middle England (2018) and Sam Byers’ Perfidious Albion (2018). These novels are both representative of predominant generic modes and themes that exist within Brexit literature, but also reflect international trends of twenty-first-century literature. Central to the stories is an atmosphere of Brexit-induced rupture which, I argue, aligns evocatively with the concept of ‘schismogenesis’ as theorised by Gregory Bateson (Szakolczai & Thomassen 2019), a phenomenon that reveals the irreconcilability within society after such a seismic event