British Covid Fictions: Reading Pandemic Politics

This is the first book-length study of Covid fictions in Britain. It argues that although it was common to see the Covid-19 pandemic as a state of exception, that is, as a unique emergency for which there was no precedent, it is misleading to treat the experience of the pandemic in Britain in isolation because the state’s political and rhetorical responses to it were less out of keeping with already existing social and political structures than might have been expected. This means that there was a strong continuity between the dominant political ideology before the outbreak of Coronavirus and that which pervaded it, an ideology that can best be described as neoliberal political and economic thought. Through its analysis of Covid fictions, the book explores ways in which writers used their work to critique the dominant ideology while also at times remaining entrapped within it precisely because it was the dominant ideology.

Hywel Dix is Professor of English at Bournemouth University, UK. He has published extensively on the relationship between literature, culture and political change in contemporary Britain, most notably in Postmodern Fiction and the Break-Up of Britain (2010), After Raymond Williams: Cultural Materialism and the Break-Up of Britain (Second Edition, 2013) and Multicultural Narratives: Traces and Perspectives, co-edited with Mustafa Kirca(2018). His wider research interests include modern and contemporary literature, critical cultural theory, authorial careers and autofiction. His monograph about literary careers entitled The Late-Career Novelist was published in 2017 and an edited collection of essays on Autofiction in English was published by Palgrave in 2018. His study of Brexit and fiction was published by University of Wales Press as Compatriots or Competitors? Welsh, Scottish, English and Northern Irish Writing and Brexit in Comparative Contexts in 2022. He has recently completed a study entitled Autofiction and Cultural Memory with Routledge.