Middle England by Jonathan Coe : a Brexit novel or the politics of emotions

Résumé 0

Jonathan Coe’s latest novel, Middle England (2018), addresses issues such as national identity and the growing role of emotion in British politics. Coe’s novel, which was recently awarded the Costa Prize for being a « perfect » Brexit novel, seems to have paved the way for what has been defined as « Brexlit. » As a matter of fact, this novel appears to be a means to furthering our understanding of Brexit, giving shape to its causes, its symptoms, and its consequences on British society and national identity. My contention is that British politics is less ideological than performative, based on sensationalism and emotion. Middle England illustrates how Brexit is concerned with emotion, staging the divorce of a British people for whom cohabitation has become increasingly difficult. This new genre, Brexlit, can be read as a means to depict a nation in crisis and to put to the test notions such as the interweaving of the emotional and the political, the definition of satire and engagement, as well as the representations of nostalgia and anger. The latter notion, anger, is reworked as an allegory to express the political within the context of the theoretical debate that claims the end of postmodernism and the advent of metamodernism. Once again, Coe shows how he excels at oscillating between tradition and experimentation, a characteristic of metamodernism. Middle England is a feat of experimentation where Coe centres on British identity and reworking the satirical mode of his earlier works such as What a Carve Up! (1994) or The Closed Circle (2004).