Performing post-Britishness : a quest for independence in the contemporary literature of England

Since the eighteenth century, the distinctness of the nations of the UK has largely been overshadowed by top-down gestures aiming to unify British identity in everyday-life discourse. Due to the impact of devolution, the debates surrounding the 2014 Scottish independence referendum, and the 2016 EU referendum, the political conflicts between state and nation have been further exposed. Compared with the other three nations, England, in the eyes of many commentators, should be the last to whine about invisibility within an Anglo-British framework. But the fact that an over-stretched England has also led to the absence of the nation can no longer be ignored. An increasing interest in the discovery of England since the 1990s suggests a political and cultural need for renegotiating the boundary between Englishness and Britishness. Nevertheless, many attempts to pinpoint an English identity in the contemporary literature have relapsed into a reconstruction of British conceptions of the nation. In response to the (re-)canonisation of British imaginations, this thesis aims to show that a turn to ‘post-Britishness’ as a reading method suggests not only a desire for the return of England in a range of literature, but also a warning of the risk of expanding the ideas of England into some renewed British ideals. Reading novels by authors including Ian McEwan, Graham Swift, Gillian Slovo, Alecky Blythe, J.G. Ballard, and Tom McCarthy, this research analyses methods pointing towards breaks from idealised imaginations of England. Contextualised in a literary space that canonises a return to imaginary past, post-British critique of this kind can reveal absurdities of using British narratives to conceptualise an English community. By studying the biopoliticalness of British ideals, this thesis argues that a moment of Englishness starting from locating an independent England unavoidably sparks a reconsideration of the organicist strategies of Britishness, and their registration in contemporary literatures. A post-British reading of these literary texts shows that the continuity of an originary (narrative) structure is the major source of the political violence of Britishness. Instead of optimistically assuming a messianic, once-for-all break from such a structure, this thesis argues that awareness of its organicist logic is crucial for understanding the systematic absorption and disciplining of English characters inside British narrative