Metamodernism and BrexLit: The Feeling of Brexit in Sam Byers’ Perfidious Albion (2018) and Jonathan Coe’s Middle England (2018)

Abstract

This thesis will examine the debate surrounding the notion of metamodernism as a framework for considering cultural products of the post-postmodern era we are in. It seeks to establish how metamodernism can be employed as a framework for the interpretation of BrexLit novels, what this reveals about the underlying structures of feeling regarding Brexit, and the way in which contemporary British literature appears to have a renewed interest in modernist concerns. The question as to the ways in which Sam Byers’ Perfidious Albion (2018) and Jonathan Coe’s Middle England (2018) reflect metamodernist concerns regarding structures of feeling in relation to Brexit, will be answered by means of close reading and textual analysis of these two novels. The findings that result from this will add to the understanding of literary responses to end engagement with the matter of Brexit, the relation between contemporary British literature and modernism, and allow for a more feasible understanding of the way in which the current historical moment is attempted to be defined in the light of metamodernist structures of feeling.