State-of-the-nation novels: debunking nationalism
Activer le mode zenIntroduction
State-of-the-nation novels demonstrate how the genre has evolved since the social realist novels of the 19th century. From addressing class discrepancies to outlining layered critiques of nationalist discourse itself, these novels deliberately expose the fractures created by political decisions and historical traumas. They challenge the very concept of nationhood by illuminating the tension between official narratives and lived experiences, where nationalism seeks cohesion and collective identity instead.
In his seminal study, Imagined Communities (1992), Benedict Anderson considers that “[t]he argument is not simply that the novel emulates the imagined community amongst strangers, upon which the modern nation depends, but that it may have played a significant role in establishing the terms of the nation” (6-7). He highlights how literature and culture partake in the construction of a common imaginative world, wherein people inhabiting the same geographical space and speaking the same language unconsciously and inevitably bond, without even having to meet.
This invisible string is, for Anderson, decisive in the construction of the nation: the shared cultural symbols and values which animate a given territory not only connect us to one another, but this congruence also creates a sense of belonging and a desire to protect one’s “nation” and what it stands for. The nation as concept circumscribes and ties together the individual and the collective. If we are to follow Anderson’s thesis, the novel would serve as a medium between the two, by giving (fictional) life to national symbols, such as the monarchy, family, or historical events. By nurturing a national narrative, centred around relatable experiences and shared values, novels would therefore be relying on the same rhetorical devices as nationalist discourse.
In the words of Anthony D. Smith in National Identity (1991), nationalism is “an ideological movement for attaining and maintaining autonomy, unity and identity on behalf of a population deemed by some of its members to constitute an actual or potential ‘nation’” (73). The nationalist emphasis on unity and identity (stemming from the Latin idem, meaning “same”) makes the nation a metonymic construct by default, wherein each person is a reflection of the whole country and where the social, political and economic constructs of the country regiment the life of its inhabitants. In this regard, if the novel truly “emulates the imagined community”, then it must surely encapsulate both the microcosm of national daily life, and the cultural macrocosm of what belonging to such a nation entails.
However, when looking more closely at the English novel, it seems that such a claim is in need of nuance, if not of complete debunking. If it’s undeniable that literature is an integral part of a country’s culture, the English literary scene is testament to a desire to rethink the terms of the nation. The development of the Condition-of-England novel in the 19th century in the midst of the Chartist movement testifies to the advent of a new form of literature which highlights the actual dissonances that animate the country. The genesis of the Condition-of-England novel is so intimately tied with political and social matters that it naturally evolved as the country was met with the new challenges of the 20th and 21st centuries. World Wars, decolonisation, Thatcherite austerity, economic crises and the Brexit referendum, are not only historical pivots: they have been determinant in shaping what we call “state-of-the-nation novels” – heirs to the “social problem” novels of Charles Dickens or to the “industrial” novels of Elizabeth Gaskell. Moving away from the 19th-century background and its emphasis on the discrepancies between the working and ruling classes, state-of-the-nation novels encompass the economic, racial, gender and political fractures of their time to expose the dissonant nature of nationalist discourse. The fact that the latest example of the genre has taken the form of “Brexlit” ((Day, 2017; Eaglestone, 2018; Self, 2020; Sutherland, 2018.)) evinces the inherent critique at the heart of the genre, which, as will be seen, aims to debunk the very existence of a harmonious imagined community at the scale of the nation.
1. From Condition-of-England to State-of-the-Nation
While Brexlit, much like the referendum itself in the history of the country, is quite distant from Condition-of-England novels ((They differ both in terms of setting (England versus the place of the United Kingdom in the European Union) and scope (if the Condition-of-England deals exclusively with class struggle, Brexlit encompasses the racial and political discord that ensued the referendum).)), the differences between the latter and what has been labelled “state-of-the-nation novels” can seem blurry. However rather than imagining three delineated genres, it seems that these three literary forms are symptomatic of the evolution of England itself. It is therefore essential to understand how these novels came to be and mutate, almost always as a reactionary indictment of the political state of the country.
1.1 The 19th-century social novel
In 1832, the British government passed the Great Reform Act of 1832, granting the property-owing middle-class the right to vote. As the Industrial Revolution was reaching its momentum ((See Hobsbawm, Eric. 1962. The Age of Revolution: 1789-1848. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Chapter 2.)), this new law sparked unrest as the working classes were disregarded. The Chartist movement emerged as a response to this institutionalisation of inequality. Historian and literary critic Thomas Carlyle (1795-1880) spearheaded the movement and wrote his essay Chartism in 1839, stating that “Chartism means the bitter discontent grown fierce and mad, the wrong condition therefore or the wrong disposition, of the Working Classes of England” (2). The People’s Charter, from which the name of the movement is derived, sought to extend the right to vote to the working classes and to make it possible for people without land to become Members of Parliament. The political movement drew attention to the living conditions of the working classes and to the law of privilege ruling Parliament. Though unsuccessful, the repeated submission of the People’s Charter to Parliament (successively in 1839, 1842 and 1848) created a new awareness as to the inequalities pervading the country and highly influenced its political and cultural life. In the words of James Richard Simmons,
To understand how and why the condition of England novel originated, it is important to understand the laws that by the 1830s compelled the public to feel there were many victims in a society in which Benjamin Disraeli’s concept of “The Two Nations,” rich and poor, was a reality. […] As the appetite for knowledge about the condition of England was whetted, novelists found an audience interested in learning more about the plight of the working classes, and the novel became a method of teaching the middle and upper classes about the “real” condition of England. Reform was on the minds of all of England, and the novel was the apparatus by which many matters of concern would be presented to the public in a manner and language not suited only for lawyers and politicians, but for the common man and woman as well. (336-337)
The Condition-of-England novel (whose name derives from Carlyle’s writings) was born out of a desire to represent the reality of its time: the dire circumstances of the working classes were in stark contrast with the ruling élite, and the novel presented itself as an opportunity to bring this realisation to the fore. If the novels of Charles Dickens are certainly the most representative of the genre, Benjamin Disraeli’s words in Sibyl (1845) still resonate to this day as an example of English class struggle:
Two nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws… THE RICH AND THE POOR. (149)
Disraeli’s diagnosis of his own country not only exposes the economic inequalities between the rich and the poor, it also shows the disunion of the country: the two groups lead parallel lives in separate yet contiguous territories. This absence of relationality weakens the possibility of a national “imagined community”: if anything, Chartism and the Condition-of-England novel prove that differences in economic status led to indifference at best, and to raging inequality at worst.
However, as Simmons’s study shows, the Condition-of-England novel had more of an informative role than a true revolutionary purpose: Victorian realism aimed at shedding light on factory life, yet its political purpose was limited to knowledge of social inequality itself, rather than to political commitment ((In the words of Peter Childs in Modernism (2005), “Realism, according to many critics, is characterised by its attempt objectively to offer up a mirror to the world, thus disavowing its own culturally conditioned processes and ideological stylistic assumptions” (3).)). The fact that Condition-of-England novels often offer social closure by way of marriage between individuals from different social classes or different political opinions (like Sibyl or Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854)) or on the birth of a child coming from economically-opposed families (Sibyl as well, and later on, Howard’s End (1910)) ((Howards End can be considered as a transitioning point between Condition-of-England novel and State-of-the-Nation novel, as Forster moves away from the solely economic aspect of the former. As Christine Reynier argues, “The central question asked in the Condition of England novel, ‘can marriage unify the nation?,’ is taken up in E. M. Forster’s Howards End (1910) while some displacements and additional elements are introduced that mark the shift from the Condition to the State of England novel: the North-South division is transformed into a threefold one between London, the suburbs and the country; Gaskell’s skepticism about the healing power of marriage is turned into a utopian ending where Leonard Bast’s and Helen Schlegel’s child, the fruit of the illegitimate union of the lower and upper classes, inherits England, an England where the English Henry Wilcox can marry the half-German Margaret Schlegel” (n.p.). However, the fact that Forster offers resolution at the end of the novel still suggests that it cannot be considered as a state-of-the-nation novel: the metonymic relationship between self and nation is still heavily relied on, rather than questioned. This has led Patrick Parrinder to define novels like Forster’s as “Novels of England’s destiny” (2006, Chapter 12), where fear for the future of the nation can be appeased by the birth of a child.)) actually gloss over the social and political tensions animating England. The happy union or the hopeful child fail to question the status quo that led to the class struggle in the first place. Like nationalism, Condition-of-England novels rely heavily on metonymy: a marriage or a birth within the closed family circle represents the possible, hopeful future of the nation altogether.
The resolution offered by Condition-of-England novels puts the genre in an ambiguous position, one that both exposes and superfluously attempts at repairing the fractures of the nation. If the genre brought awareness to living conditions in English factories and London slums, it lacked the depth and contradictive impetus ((See Simmons (2002, 349) and Shires (2005, 61-76).)) needed to foster reflection on the actual state of the nation. At the beginning of the 20th century, two catalysts pushed the genre in a new direction. The rise of New Woman fiction ((Though this article will not dwell on the specifics of New Woman fiction, it’s fundamental to understand that the movement, alongside the development of Modernist literature, challenged the aesthetic and political stance of 19th-century literature which is itself at the heart of state-of-the-nation novels. Talia Schaffer sees the movement as “a fascinating period of transition away from Victorian separate spheres, recording the stresses, anxieties, and freedoms women experienced as they rebelled against traditional roles. […] In rebelling against high Victorian realism, New Women writers also revolted against the norms of narrative structure. They ignored conventions about introducing characters, they flouted the normal marriage plot, and they violated closure” (2013, 729-735).)), focused on female experience and asymmetrical gender relations, as well as the outbreak of the First World War put a term to the Condition-of-England novel as defined in the 19th century: far gone were the triple-decker novels, their industrial background and their reconciliating endings.
1.2 Diving into the crisis
While Condition-of-England novels’ techniques relied on realism and lengthy narratives, state-of-the-nation novels stand against both of these. Throughout the 20th and 21st centuries, the genre has become increasingly fragmented, full of ellipses, blanks on the page and blanks in the chronology of events, and unconclusive endings. If this aesthetic has been more visible in the second half of the 20th century and later on, the years between the two World Wars have certainly given the genre its inclination for defying the status quo. State-of-the-nation novels have the particularity of being written during or in the wake of historical events. However, contrary to nationalist discourses, which use the event as a catalyst for unification, this genre allows for a reflection on the actual rifts that exist between the nation and the individual. State-of-the-nation novels of the beginning of the 20th century question this imbalance through the prism of the War.
Novels like Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier (1918) or Winifred Holtby’s South Riding (1936) illustrate the departure from Condition-of-England novels by first addressing class struggle in a new light. Rather than an opposition between factory workers and politicians, class delineates how one behaves, what one is entitled to do or not, how one is perceived or recognised by others. In both novels, marriage is constricted by the rule of class: West’s eponymous soldier married his wife Kitty because of his social standing, while in Holtby’s novel, Robert Carne’s wife is said to have gone mad for having married outside of her class. The nuance brought to both marriage and class is but a first incision into the gloss offered by the Condition-of-England novel.
The experience of the First World War very much informs state-of-the-nation novels of the beginning of the 20th century. While poems from the front, like those of Siegried Sassoon, are emblematic of life on the battlefield, state-of-the-nation novels emerged from the civil lines. Rebecca West’s novel evinces how domestic issues, male vulnerability and female experience have been paradoxically muted and exacerbated by the conflict. Addressing shellshock for one of the first times in literature (Childs, 2015, 180), West uses contemporary psychology writings to intertwine the horror of the battlefield with the strictures of gender relations. On the one hand, men cannot feel, at the risk of seeming fragile; on the other, women’s traumas have no place in private and public history. Chris Baldry’s shellshock is intimately linked to the death of the couple’s child: his last memories date back from before his marriage, while Kitty has never been able to properly mourn their child. The taboo around the child’s death and the fractures within their marriage suggest that rather than presenting the war as the main wound of the beginning of the century, West turns it into another fracture in the English landscape – one that only superseded the perduring ones of gender and class.
In a complete reversal, the national event is overshadowed by the realities of domestic life, and the metonymic constructions of both nationalist discourse and Condition-of-England novels are not only questioned, but altogether shattered. Holtby’s South Riding, like West’s novel, insists on the traumatic lingering of the First World War, both for those who fought and those who remained. If she depicts the haunting memories of the departed, she also thwarts national symbols and rituals to expose the discrepancies between a nationalist desire to unite the nation and the reality of the population’s sufferings. The depiction of the 1935 Silver Jubilee, destined to unite the nation around the royal family in the interwar period (Hobsbawm, 2012, 142), is used as an indirect criticism of the prevalence of the nation over its constituents. One of the socialist characters of the novel, Joe Astell, sees the celebration as a failed cover-up of the trauma of the past war and as a decoy for the war to come (“flags to-day, gas-masks tomorrow” (504)). Like West before her, Holtby subverts the significance of the national event and the artificiality of national cohesion, by emphasising individual suffering.
This shift of focus from the collective to the individual is what allows state-of-the-nation novels to diagnose and critique the English nation. This particularism enables writers to move away from generalising discourses and question the institutions meant to protect and serve the people. The uncertainty towards the future, embodied by the Baldry household in West and by the fear of a second world conflict in Holtby, are crystallised further in novels written after 1945.
1.3 Post-war state of the nation
In Literature of the 1940s: War, Postwar and ‘Peace’ (2013), Gill Plain explains that
[The] Britain that emerged from the 1940s was different from the nation of the 1930s. The world beyond Britain had been similarly transformed. […] [The] 1940s as a whole changed the limits of imaginative possibility. The decade opened with a heightened awareness of self and society, with Britain and everything it stood for facing an unparalleled threat. It ended in exhaustion, facing the possibility that winning the war had been achieved at the cost not only of imperial power and international authority, but also of any coherent sense of national identity. (17-18)
If the Blitz created an unparalleled sense of national togetherness that revamped the nationalist myth of collective suffering, the Second World War triggered a crisis of meaning. The horror of the conflict created distrust in the government and in the political institutions that led the war effort, as well as religious disbelief fostered by the incomprehensibility of mass-destruction. The frailty of national unity and the progressive disintegration of the Empire served as a catalyst for state-of-the-nation novels of the post-war. Novels like Stevie Smith’s The Holiday (1949) evince the political, social and spiritual disorientation caused by the conflict. Characters linked to the Empire and to the Church through their occupation are represented as derelict symbols, while the protagonist cannot cope with her country and fellow Britons’ corruption (“We are among corrupt people, how can we be innocent” (131)). She fails to see how the nation can exempt itself from the actions perpetrated during the war. The Holiday and its growing distrust towards institutions show how state-of-the-nation novels further distanced themselves from realism and nationalism, by putting psychological turmoil to the forefront, as a result of national politics.
Post-war literature has often been compartmentalised into two types of novels: some were coming back to realism, sometimes with a nostalgic dimension, and others were moving further away from it by experimenting with form. Critics like Andrzej Gasiorek have nonetheless demonstrated the rich diversity in post-war fiction, and underlined how these different literary techniques were nurturing each other. If examples of state-of-the-nation novels are scarce when looking at the 1950s-1970s period, the work of Angus Wilson still stands as a paragon of the genre during this time.
No Laughing Matter (1967) offers a complex literary approach through its innovative structure and thematic concerns. The novel’s five-part division, spanning from pre-war years to 1967, employs strategic chronological gaps that mirror both familial estrangement and societal fragmentation. Through the Matthews family’s narrative, particularly the six children’s diverse political engagements – from Quentin’s communist affiliations to Marcus’s anti-fascist stance and advocacy for the homosexual community – Wilson interweaves personal and political spheres. His tour de force lies in his deliberate avoidance of main historical events which nonetheless haunt his characters: World Wars are hinted at for instance, but trigger traumatic memories; the Suez Crisis of 1956 is not addressed per se but forces Margaret Matthews to relocate, which in turn lets her imperialistic views transpire. This tension between individual experience and national history goes together with the deconstruction of the familial metonymy. Clara and William Matthews’ neglect of their children serves as a microcosm for broader social decay: their parental abuse (which ranges from moral to sexual harassment) challenges the traditional literary device of using family dynamics to represent national unity. While often mischaracterised as purely realist or Dickensian, Wilson’s integration of private trauma with public history, combined with his blend of theatrical elements, satire, and prose, demonstrates his assertion that “society and civilization rest on a very thin ice” (Wilson quoted in MacDowell, 1972, 80), while exposing the shortcomings of nostalgia for England’s past.
Wilson’s work suggests that effective engagement with contemporary issues requires formal innovation, using personal narratives to illuminate broader social and political concerns. His portrayal of the Matthews family’s disintegration anticipated broader social ruptures, particularly in his depiction of class aspirations and familial breakdown. This literary diagnosis of social instability would prove especially pertinent with the emergence of Thatcherism in 1979, when the very foundations of post-war British society underwent radical transformation. The shift from welfare state policies to aggressive market liberalisation demanded new literary forms capable of capturing increasingly complex social and economic realities.
1.4 Thatcher and Beyond: the tale of a dis-United Kingdom
If state-of-the-nation novels were not at the forefront of the literary scene in the first part of the 20th century, the 1980s and the 1990s were certainly one of the most proliferous decades for the genre. The twin development of Thatcherism and neoliberalism led novelists like Martin Amis, David Lodge and Jonathan Coe to address the societal risks of the policies implemented under Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990). Increased privatisation, public expenditure cuts, and emphasis on profitability and competition created a growing sense of individualism and state-withdrawal in the country. This is embodied by Thatcher’s own statement in her 1987 interview for the magazine Woman’s Own (Keay, 1987): “There is no such thing [as society]! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first” (30). Not only did Thatcher’s agenda profoundly changed the United Kingdom, but it also modified the way state-of-the-nation novels were written.
While Martin Amis’s Money (1984) focuses on the financial and moral corruption of the individual in the climate of the 1980s, David Lodge’s Nice Work (1988) highlights how education is, on the other hand, slowly deprived of national funding. If the two novels point out the significative tensions between growing individualism and institutional decay, Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up! (1994) remains the most emblematic novel of the period. Eschewing traditional 19th-century literary conventions, which he deemed “too formally satisfying” (Coe, 2012) for contemporary sociopolitical complexities, Coe crafted a “postmodern whodunnit” (Guignery, 2001; Alexandre, 2009) that interweaves multiple genres, including tabloid articles, board meeting minutes, interview transcripts, diaries, and gothic tales. Through the protagonist Michael Owen, hired by the mysterious Peacock Press to chronicle the powerful Winshaw family, the novel systematically exposes how different sectors of British society – banking, healthcare, art, food industry, and media (each controlled by a Winshaw sibling) – fell under the control of neoliberal interests. The narrative’s oscillation between 1942 and 1991 serves to trace the historical roots of this transformation while highlighting its impact on ordinary citizens like Michael and his vulnerable neighbour Fiona.
Coe’s work has been determining for the genre: if What a Carve Up! perfectly highlighted the disintegration of British society under Thatcherism, his Rotter Trilogy (The Rotters’ Club (2001), The Closed Circle (2004) and Middle England (2018)) further documents the fragmentation of family life through historical events and political conjectures, from the Winter of Discontent, to the pitfalls of the Blair government, to Brexit. The dysfunctional Rotter family and Coe’s fragmentation technique both expose how politics infiltrate family life and how any notion of community is made almost impossible by competitive capitalism.
What a Carve Up! had presciently mapped the systemic transformation of British society under neoliberalism, and the 2008 financial crisis would later validate many of Coe’s critiques, as demonstrated in subsequent works like John Lanchester’s Capital (2012). Through its fragmented structure of 107 chapters spanning December 2007 to November 2008, this state-of-the-nation novel examines London’s gentrified Pepys Road as a microcosm of contemporary Britain, revealing the crisis’s impact across social strata. Capital is part of what Sathnam Sanghera calls “Crunch Lit”, a genre “encouraging readers to reflect on contemporary society and the role of finance in the modern world” and “offer[ing] the crisis as an opportunity to rethink the relationship between the state and the markets, and between individuals and finance in the twenty-first century” (Shaw, 2015, 15).
Lanchester’s work is particularly significant in its analysis of neoliberalism: Capital illustrates the growing disconnect between market forces and human welfare. The novel opens on the diagnosis that “Britain had become a country of winners and losers” (2013, 7): this statement does not merely act as a social commentary but as a structural principle, organising its narrative around the increasingly stark divisions in British society, by opposing for instance a City trader to an illegal political refugee struggling to survive in London. Lanchester creates a telescopic view of how financial abstraction impacts lived experience: zooming in on the Pepys Road allows him to underpin more precisely the disconnected nature of contemporary relations.
This evolution in the state-of-the-nation novel, from Coe’s satirical dissection of Thatcherism to Lanchester’s examination of the subprime crisis, demonstrates how contemporary state-of-the-nation novels have evolved to represent increasingly complex forms of social and economic power. Their structures mirror the fragmentation and individualisation of the nation, while the multiple characters of the novels evidence how marketisation has replaced the welfare state, and competition has taken over human connection.
This transformation of the British landscape, as diagnosed by novelists like Coe and Lanchester, reached its paroxysm with the 2016 Brexit referendum, which revealed how the economic tensions chronicled in state-of-the-nation novels were intertwined with deeper social and political fissures. The vote crystallised divisions that the genre had long explored: class antagonisms, economic divides, and racial tensions.
2. Brexlit and Jonathan Coe’s Bournville
The period between 2016 and 2024 saw these latent tensions erupt into overt crisis. The murder of MP Jo Cox, escalating hate crimes, successive governmental collapses, and the pandemic’s exposure of NHS vulnerabilities were not new phenomena but rather the acceleration of long-standing social deterioration. State-of-the-nation novels dealing with the referendum emerged, starting with Ali Smith’s Autumn (2016). Smith’s kaleidoscopic approach, reminiscent of both Holtby and Wilson, shows the lineage of state-of-the-nation novels in addressing patterns of disconnection within the country. As Kristian Shaw argues, Brexlit evinces the “ongoing conversation Britain is continuing to have with itself through [the novel]. [It can serve] as a significant, socially constitutive form for challenging monolithic constructions of national identity […]” (2021, 4).
One of the most recent examples of the genre is certainly Jonathan Coe’s Bournville (2022). The novel is set in the eponymous village, home to the Cadbury factory, and follows the life of Mary from 1945 to 2020. The book is made up of seven chapters, each defined by an historical event: VE Day, the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953, the 1966 World Cup final, the investiture of the Prince of Wales in 1969, the 1981 royal wedding, the death of Princess Diana in 1997, and the 75th anniversary of VE Day in 2020 during the Covid-19 pandemic. Each section allows the reader to meet and discover Mary’s family, from her parents and her husband, to her children and grandchildren.
The genealogy traced in Bournville, much like the events depicted, is at first reminiscent of the tropes of the Condition-of-England novels: Mary’s family can be considered as a metonymic depiction of life in England itself, while the events chosen by Coe to weave his narrative seem symbolic of British national identity. Structurally, Bournville almost looks like a tale of reconciliation rather than a subversive state-of-the-nation novel.
Nevertheless, the togetherness of VE Day in 1945 slowly erodes throughout the pages, up to the point where its mirror event in 2020 appears like a paroxysmal replica of post-war tensions. The celebratory crowd of 1945 is replaced by isolated community members, who cannot celebrate together because of the pandemic. In 1945, Carl, the grandfather of Mary’s future husband, is attacked because of his German accent and name on the street during the celebration. In 2020, her son’s black wife, Bridget, confronts her brother-in-law about his vote for Brexit and the discrimination she suffered from by joining the family. Bridget holds perhaps the most poignant monologues of the novel, which circumscribes the family not as a metonymy for the national imagined community but as an embodiment of its disintegration:
‘I was part of your family’, she said, speaking slowly, choosing each word with care and pronouncing it without emphasis. ‘I went on holiday with you. I had dinner with you. I came to your weddings and your christenings and funerals. I gave them grandchildren, Geoffrey and Mary. Thirty-two years, [your father] and I knew each other. Thirty-two years. And in all that time, do you know what¸ he never once – not once – looked me in the eye. He couldn’t do that. He couldn’t bring himself to do it. […] And all that time, the rest of you… Yes, sure, you’ve always been nice, you’ve always been kind, you’ve always been friendly, but you knew. You could see it. All of you. And you never did a damn thing about it. Not a damn, fucking thing. You closed ranks. You never said a word to him and do you know what that means? It means you took his side. So it’s got nothing to do with who voted for what – I mean, maybe the referendum was the last straw but to be honest who cares whether you want to be a part of the European Union or not, who gives a shit about that. It just made everything clearer than ever, that’s all. Where we stood. Where you stood. […] All for a quiet life. All so the sacred family could be preserved, as if there was nothing underneath the surface that stank. Stank to high heaven.’ (346-347)
The use of italics in this passage serves as a line of fracture that unfolds on three different levels: between Bridget and her husband’s family, between racial groups in Britain ((A dramatic rise in hate crimes against people of colour was registered in the wake of the Brexit referendum. See for instance articles by the BBC (https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-37640982) or The Guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/oct/13/hate-crimes-eu-referendum-home-office-figures-confirm).)), between the United Kingdom and the European Union. The use of metonymy as a nationalist trope is here completely subverted, as Bridget now embodies the experience of a disunited Britain. Not only does her speech highlights the divisions within the country through her own experience, but it also exposes the indirect collusion of those who silently observe racism unfold on a personal, local and national level. The last lines of Bridget’s indictment point to the artificiality of nationalist symbols, which are but a façade that fails to hold the country together. After using historical events involving the royal family as moments of national union throughout the novel, Bridget’s scathing conclusion also indirectly denounces the British monarchy (“the sacred family”) which becomes an empty symbolic vessel. This resonates with earlier state-of-the-nation novels like Holtby’s, underlining how the genre corrodes nationalist gloss to expose the social and political cracks running through the country.
Conclusion
State-of-the-nation novels are defined by their capacity to critique: they do so through form and through a subversion of nationalist tropes. They often rely on blurred timelines or distorted national events, which allows them to put individual experience at the forefront of their narrative. The genre has developed a more and more fragmented aesthetics: the unreliable narrators and ellipses characteristic of Modernist writing, the distrust of the language that was weaponised during the Second World War, the mixing of genres and most of all, the irresolution of plots and stories, are all essential components of the state-of-the-nation novels that differentiate them from their 19th-century counterpart. These techniques foster a critical analysis of the English zeitgeist, which exposes the unreliability and artificiality of national myths and symbols, especially in times of crisis. Their focus on the individual consequences of historical events or of political decisions not only shows the deep instability of the country that led to Brexit, but also demonstrates the growing disunion and isolation of its inhabitants – making Anderson’s claim void of resonance today.
Notes
Bibliography
ALEXANDRE, Véronique. 2009. “Le statut des énigmes dans What a Carve Up! de Jonathan Coe”, in Michel Briand, Colette Camelin and Liliane Louvel (eds.), Les écritures secrètes. Place: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, pp.225-37.
ANDERSON, Benedict. 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.
CARLYLE, Thomas. 1840 (1839). “Condition of England Question”, in James Fraser, Chartism, pp.1-8.
CHILDS, Peter. 2015 (2000). Modernism. London: Routledge.
COE, Jonathan. 2016 (1994). What a Carve Up!. London: Penguin Essentials.
---. “Why are we obsessed with the state-of-the-nation novel?”, The Newstateman, 12 July 2012. URL: www.newstatesman.com/culture/culture/2012/07/why-are-we-obsessed-state-nationnovel.
---. 2023 (2022). Bournville. London: Penguin.
DAY, Jon. “BrexLit: the New Landscape of British Fiction”, Financial Times, 28 July 2017. URL: https://www.ft.com/content/30ec47b4-7204-11e7-93ff-99f383b09ff9.
DISRAELI, Benjamin. 1934 (1845). Sybil or The Two Nations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
EAGLESTONE, Robert (ed.). 2018. Brexit and Literature. Critical and Cultural Responses. London: Routledge.
GĄSIOREK, Andrzej. 2015. A History of Modernist Literature. Hoboken: Wiley Blackwell.
GUIGNERY, Vanessa. 2011. “‘Colonel mustard, in the billiard room, with the revolver’: Jonathan Coe’s What a Carve Up! as a Postmodern Whodunit”, Études Anglaises, volume 64, n°4, pp.427-438. URL: https://doi.org/10.3917/etan.644.0427.
HOBSBAWM, Eric J. 2012 (1990). Nations and Nationalism since 1780. Programme, Myth, Reality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
HOLTBY, Winifred. 2010 (1936). South Riding. 1936. London: Virago Press.
KEAY, Douglas. 1987. “Aids, education and the year 2000”, interview with Margaret Thatcher. Woman’s Own, 23 September 1987. URL: https://www.margaretthatcher.org/document/106689.
LANCHESTER, John. 2013 (2012). Capital. London: Faber and Faber.
MACDOWELL, Frederic P.W. 1972. “An Interview with Angus Wilson”, The Iowa Review, volume 3, n°4, pp.77-105. URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20157965.
PARRINDER, Patrick. 2006. Nation and Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
PLAIN, Gill. 2013. Literature of the 1940s: War, Postwar and ‘Peace’: Volume 5. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
REYNIER, Christine. 2015. “Exploring the Modernist State of England Novel by Women Novelists: Rebecca West, Radclyffe Hall and Winifred Holtby”, Études britanniques contemporaines, volume 49. URL: https://doi.org/10.4000/ebc.2635.
SANGHERA, Sathnam. “Confessions of the man who caused the credit crunch”, The Times, 20 April 2009. URL: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/confessions-of-the-man-who-caused-the-credit-crunch-36zd8v7g56l.
SCHAFFER, Talia. 2013. “The Victorian Novel and the New Woman”, in Lisa Rodensky (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Victorian Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp.729-745.
SELF, John. “How Brexit has reshaped the British novel”, Penguin Books Features, 30 January 2020. URL: https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2020/01/how-writers-responded-to-brexit-in-novels.
SIMMONS, James Richard Jr. 2002. “Industrial and ‘Condition of England’ Novels”, in Patrick Brantlinger and William B. Thesing (eds.), A Companion to The Victorian Novel. Oxford: Blackwell, pp.336-352.
SHAW, Katy. 2015. Crunch Lit. London: Bloomsbury.
SHAW, Kristian. 2021. Brexlit: British Literature and the European Project. London: Bloomsbury.
SHIRES, Linda M. 2005. “The Aesthetics of the Victorian Novel: Form, Subjectivity, Ideology”, in Deirdre David (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Victorian Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp.61-76.
SMITH, Anthony D. 1991. National Identity. Reno: University of Nevada Press.
SMITH, Stevie. 1979 (1949). The Holiday. London: Virago Modern Classics.
SUTHERLAND, John. 2018. “Brexit Lit”, Literary Review, n°468. URL: https://literaryreview.co.uk/brexit-lit.
WEST, Rebecca. 2004 (1918). The Return of the Soldier. London: The Modern Library.
WILSON, Angus. 1969 (1967). No Laughing Matter. London: Penguin Books.
Pour citer cette ressource :
Alice Borrego, State-of-the-nation novels: debunking nationalism, La Clé des Langues [en ligne], Lyon, ENS de LYON/DGESCO (ISSN 2107-7029), avril 2025. Consulté le 30/05/2025. URL: https://cle.ens-lyon.fr/anglais/litterature/litterature-britannique/state-of-the-nation-novels-debunking-nationalism
