Since ¡°Brexit was partly a cultural event, we have to use our best cultural tools to analyse it, some of which come out of literary studies¡±.

That is the claim of Robert Eaglestone, professor of contemporary literature and thought at Royal Holloway, University of London, who brought together a team of 18 literary scholars, writers and poets for a new collection on Brexit and Literature: Critical and Cultural Perspectives (Routledge), for which all royalties will be donated to

¡°English studies have always been tied up with ideas about national identity,¡± Professor Eaglestone explained. ¡°Yet most of the academic conversation about Brexit has come from social scientists. Humanities can give us a deeper, rounder picture¡­We need to bring our scholarship to bear on this enormous contemporary issue. Literature is kind of messy, just like human beings are.¡±

Though he admitted that literary studies seldom offered direct ¡°policy implications¡±, Professor Eaglestone was convinced that they can ¡°feed into our thinking about the nature of communities past, present and future, and help us shape our lives and communities¡±. Anne Varty¡¯s chapter in his book about the June 2016 ¡°Shore to Shore¡± poetry tour organised by Carol Ann Duffy, he added, gave a sense of literature ¡°capturing a live wire of feeling, something changing and developing as the tour went through Britain¡±.

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At a launch event for the book held at the University of London¡¯s Senate House, Professor Eaglestone explored the dangerous way that ¡°Brexit discourse is saturated with memory of the Second World War: Spitfires, White Cliffs, Churchill, poor Churchillian rhetoric¡­the idea Britain ¡®was greatest in its history when it stood alone¡¯¡±.

Other contributors to the book explored further insights to be gained from literature and literary studies.

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Kristian Shaw, senior lecturer in English literature at the University of Lincoln, recalled being ¡°openly ridiculed¡± by colleagues after a visit to family and friends in the North-East of England led him to ¡°put some money on a Leave result in the referendum¡±. He was now working on the genre of ¡°post-Brexit fiction¡± he had named ¡°BrexLit¡± and warned against the danger of just ¡°creat[ing] another leftist echo chamber that neither heals nor speaks to an already fractious nation¡±. Yet we were beginning to find novels ¡°gesturing towards more inclusive and diverse forms of public culture, identifying the social divisions affecting the nation?¨C and engaging in a struggle with British society and its prevailing political climate¡±. At a time when national culture was being reshaped, it was crucial that literature should retain its role as ¡°a bastion of cultural cosmopolitanism¡±.

James Smith, lecturer in English literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, meanwhile, put the case for ¡°a progressive response to Brexit¡± which ¡°refuse[s] to feel hard done by¡­and refuse[s] nostalgia, either for preposterous myths of Britain of the past¡­or for the alleged consensus that aspired to remove crucial questions from the political realm¡±.

matthew.reisz@timeshighereducation.com