‘It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. Again’: Representing the Body Politic after Brexit

• Published in: Études britanniques contemporaines Vol. 57; no. 57
• Main Author: Bernard, Catherine
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Presses universitaires de la Méditerranée 26.11.2019; Presses Universitaires de la Méditerranée
• Subjects: body politic; Brexit; Brexlit; community; Duffy (Carol Ann); Smith (Ali); populism; identité; Duffy (Carol Ann); mimesis; Smith (Ali); corps politique; community; democracy; communauté; démocratie; body politic; identity; Brexit; populisme; Brexlit
• ISSN: 1168-4917; 2271-5444
• DOI: 10.4000/ebc.7401

Ali Smith’s Autumn (2016) inaugurated what was soon to be termed defined as ‘Brexlit’. Turning to Smith’s text and other post-brexit productions, among which Carol Ann Duffy and Rufus Norris’ My Country: A Work in Progress (2017), and Brexit Shorts: Dramas from a Divided Nation (2017), we examine how fiction and recent drama self-reflexively explore the (un)making of a nation. At stake is the capacity of literature to act as a fully demotic medium, as the relay of a conflicted sense of identity. Some of the most controversial and complex notions—people, community, communitas—elaborated to think democracy are here put to the test. Now, these works seem to imply, is also the time to rework one of the most influential and powerful allegories of the common in Britain’s history: that of the body politic. Reflecting on the re-embodiment of the allegory in an age of doubt, we show how these fictions ponder the political empiricism of the embodied allegory and how such an embodied allegory may offer a fruitful inflection of the mimetic pact.