Description
The paper explores how Brexit is constructed as a political failure in contemporary literature. While research has paid much attention to how meaning is attributed to Brexit in political discourse, it has largely ignored literature, and the arts more broadly, as an important site of meaning-making around Brexit. In addressing this gap, the paper focuses on selected political satires that form part of a wide variety of largely critical literary responses to Brexit for which literary scholars have introduced the category of “Brexlit”. It draws on a method of narrative analysis to reconstruct the main narrative elements that are used in these works to portray Brexit as a failure on three constitutive narrative dimensions: setting, characters and plot. The paper argues that Brexlit narratives bring in rich intertextual references to real political events and actors in the Brexit process, but do so in a way that mobilises the subversive potential of satires. Along these lines, Brexlit makes a distinct, and potentially very powerful, contribution to ongoing constructions of Brexit as a major political failure in broader public discourse.
