Rewriting the North: Contemporary British Fiction and the Cultural Politics of Devolution

This book shows how twenty-first-century writing about Northern England imagines alternative democratic futures for the region and the English nation, signalling the growing awareness of England as a distinct and variegated political formation. In 2016, the Brexit vote intensified ongoing constitutional tensions throughout the UK, which have been developing since the devolution of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland in 1997. At the same time, British devolution developed a distinctively cultural registration as a surrogate for parliamentary representation and an attempt to disrupt the status of London as Britain’s cultural epicentre. Rewriting the North shifts this debate in a new direction, examining Northern literary preoccupation with devolution’s constitutional implications. Through close readings of six contemporary authors - Sunjeev Sahota, Sarah Hall, Anthony Cartwright, Adam Thorpe, Fiona Mozley, and Sarah Moss - this book argues that literary engagement with the North emphasises regional devolution’s limited constitutional charge, calling instead for an urgent abandonment of the British centralised state form.

Chloe Ashbridge is Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Newcastle University, where her research concerns the interplay between British literature and politics. She is the author of several publications on working-class writing and neoliberalism, regional uneven development in Brexit literature, and the relationship between the literary North and Black Britishness. Chloe is currently researching the function of regional literary awards in the context of Britain’s devolving cultural and creative economy. Rewriting the North is her first book.