Twenty-First-Century British Fiction and the City

Magali Cornier Michael

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319897271
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319897288
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Storia sociale

The essays in this edited collection offer incisive and nuanced analyses of and insights into the state of British cities and urban environments in the twenty-first century. Britain's experiences with industrialization, colonialism, post-colonialism, global capitalism, and the European Union (EU) have had a marked influence on British ideas about and British literature's depiction of the city and urban contexts. Recent British fiction focuses in particular on cities as intertwined with globalization and global capitalism (including the proliferation of media) and with issues of immigration and migration. Indeed, decolonization has brought large numbers of people from former colonies to Britain, thus making British cities ever more diverse. Such mixing of peoples in urban areas has led to both racist fears and possibilities of cosmopolitan co-existence.

© The Author(s) 2018

Magali Cornier Michael (ed.)Twenty-First-Century British Fiction and the CityLiterary Urban Studieshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89728-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Twenty-First-Century British Fiction and the City

Magali Cornier Michael¹

(1)

English Department, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Magali Cornier Michael

Email: [email protected]

End Abstract

The city and urban environments feature prominently in a host of acclaimed twenty-first-century British novels, but relatively little scholarship to date has focused specifically on this aspect of these texts. The collection of chapters included in the present book redresses this gap by exploring not only the variety of ways in which recent British fiction engages the city and the urban more generally but also how that engagement remains inextricable from the specific context of the new millennium. While, as Kevin McNamara notes in his 2014 introduction to The Cambridge Companion to the City in Literature, “The history of the city in literature is as lengthy and rich as the histories of literature and cities themselves” (2014b, p. 1), the particular history of Britain arguably has created a literature that treats the city in distinctive ways. Most notably, Britain’s experiences with industrialization, colonialism, post-colonialism, global capitalism, and the European Union (EU) have had a marked influence on British ideas about and British literature’s depiction of the city and urban contexts.

On the one hand, the focus on the city in recent texts continues a recognizable trend within a substantive array of British literature from medieval times to the present, particularly given that urban populations have been steadily and on occasion exponentially expanding during that span of years in Britain. Indeed, the city has long functioned as both a setting and a means of situating and contextualizing characters and their actions and interactions. As McNamara argues about city literature more generally, “Exploring the interplay of urban environments and human behavior is one of the things that city literature does best” (p. 5). At the same time, literary interest in the city has often also served as a valuable “part of the documentary record of urban thought” (p. 6) and, more specifically, as a means of “chronicl[ing] the advantages and disadvantages of urban existence” (Lehan 1998, p. 286), which has been particularly notable within the British novel from its inception in the late seventeenth century to the present time.

On the other hand, recent British fiction differs from its predecessors as a consequence of the changing aspects of British cities in the new millennium, and this will be the primary focus of this introduction and book. Over the course of the final decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first-century, “The dismantling of the colonial order, ever more forced displacements and willing departures for new lands, and cheaper, faster transportation that makes periodic returns to the homeland possible for a larger number of migrants have globalized the populations” of many British cities (McNamara 2014b, p. 8). ¹ For example, according to Michael Perfect, 2011 census data indicated that “37 per cent of Londoners—some three million people—were born in a foreign country” (2014, p. 4). Not surprisingly, “urban cores are primary destinations for historic and contemporary migration” (Hall 2015, p. 856) for numerous reasons—including, among others, economic opportunity; accessibility in terms of major ports, railway stations, and airports; a more diverse population; the presence of established communities from many immigrants’ or migrants’ home countries; and greater anonymity for the undocumented. ² Moreover, in the first decade and a half of the twenty-first-century, British-born children of immigrants and subsequent generations make up an increasing subsection of the British urban population, and the ease of travel within the Eurozone has further increased the diversity of people who reside in British cities.

Fear and anger in the face of this diversity arguably bolstered the politically charged campaign to exit the EU, leading to the June 2016 British referendum in which a majority voted to leave the EU and indicating the distinct possibility of further retrenchment and an increase in reactionary policies. Such fear of immigrants has come to the surface multiple times in Britain since decolonization, often in racist terms, perhaps most notably in Enoch Powell’s 1968 “now infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech warning against the dangers of immigration” (Bentley 2008, p. 17). Changes in the make-up of the population in the new millennium have significantly altered British cities themselves, given that a much more diverse populace lives, works, and interacts in relatively close quarters. Indeed, “the everyday movement, mixing and exchange” of large numbers of people necessarily “saturates and transforms urban spaces” (Hall 2015, p. 854). One relevant urban studies analysis of census data in England and Wales indicates that “there has been increased residential mixing between each ethnic group (the white British majority and all minority groups), and that urban locales have experienced a decrease in segregation between 2001 and 2011” (Catney 2016, p. 1691).

In addition, numerous British city centers have undergone major physical redevelopment and regeneration projects since the late twentieth century. Such projects reversed a trend that saw the serious decline of city centers over the course of the twentieth century—including increasing association with “decay, poverty, social malaise, civil unrest” (Hall 2002, p. 12)—as a consequence of “The deterioration in the economic bases of Britain’s cities” (Lawless 1986, p. 24). Redevelopment and regeneration projects stemmed at least in part from “a new emphasis on quality in the urban environment” (Hall 2002, p. 420) ³ as well as a rejection by some younger middle to upper class chiefly white Britons of the long commutes that had become the norm for many of their working parents, the increasing (often temporary) presence of middle to upper-class people from across the globe working for multinational corporations with offices in city centers, and the achievement of middle-class status by increasing numbers of non-whites—particularly among the children of immigrants. As Phil Jones and James Evans document, “For the decade leading up to 2008, towns and cities across the UK were undergoing a series of dramatic reconfigurations” that “profoundly transformed aspects of urban life—both the way towns and cities look and how we live in them”: “In the 1980s city centres were not places where people lived, while today exclusive flats and apartments in urban cores are fashionable” (Jones and Evans 2013, pp. 2, 230). As a result, city centers have experienced a significant resurgence as desirable places in which to live in twenty-first-century Britain as across the world, even with the increased threat of terrorism in major global cities like London.

While the mixing of people is thus on the rise in British cities and while “the middle classes are increasingly occupying a diverse range of neighbourhoods,” to the extent that it has become clear that the middle classes are highly heterogeneous (Bacqué et al. 2015, p. 1), a class divide nevertheless continues to dominate between neighborhoods within urban areas. Indeed, gentrification of particular city centers and suburban neighborhoods has often meant the pushing out of the working classes and at times even the middle classes—with such shifts disproportionally affecting non-whites, who have a greater tendency to live in urban locales. Commuting to the city center for work while living outside the city center, often in a suburb but sometimes a more rural setting, remains a choice for many. However, commuting has also become a necessity for many in large cities such as London where prices for urban housing have become extremely high. Moreover, both within city centers and suburbs, certain people have chosen to live in gated communities, organized to physically keep out those deemed undesirable and potentially violent or criminal. While “Systems of walls and class division are deeply ingrained in historic Europe as a means of wealthy people protecting themselves,” gated communities in twenty-first-century British city centers and suburbs are firmly anchored in a contemporary “discourse of urban fear [that] encodes other social concerns including class, race, and ethnic exclusivity” and that creates “new forms of exclusion and residential segregation” (Low 2001, pp. 45, 46, 56). Indeed, contemporary gated communities are one of a number of socially reactionary responses to the increasing diversity of British urban populations and neighborhoods.

As this discussion makes clear, British cities have witnessed changes that make these cities and urban environments distinct in the new millennium. Any analysis of cities immediately reveals that they cannot be viewed simply as static objects: “Cities are never finished objects” (Jones and Evans 2013, p. 2). Whether viewed as “an evolving organism,” as in the early twentieth-century work of “the Chicago School of urban sociologists” (Isenberg 2006, p. xii), or more often recently as constructed by sociohistorical forces, change characterizes cities. Indeed, cities are always in process not only in terms of the populations that inhabit them and their physical attributes but also, crucially, in terms of the ways in which they are conceptualized. Physical cities are always overlaid with “concepts about ‘the city’ or about ‘urban living’” that are historically and “culturally specific” (Finnegan 1998, p. 3), so that conceptualizations of cities vary greatly. For example, “Enlightenment thought” conceived of “the city as a way of controlling nature for the purpose of bringing wealth into being” by “Emphasizing the power of reason and technology” and privileging “the principle of natural rights rather than birthrights” (Lehan 1998, p. 285). The early twentieth century saw the rise of “the modernists’ vision” of the city as “an atomistic and fragmented space.” More recently, “postmodern” conceptualizations of the city view it as “labyrinthine enigma,” “physical manifestation of a culture of consumerist excess,” and/or “palimpsest of histories and narrative evoked in the psyche of the observer” (Bentley 2014, pp. 175, 176). At the same time, the contemporary postcolonial city often is characterized in terms of “debate, motion, movement, and interaction” (Herbert 2014, p. 213) and/or as “site of continuous exchange, economic and monetary, as well as linguistic and cultural” (Seyhan 2014, p. 216). Such varied ways of conceptualizing the city affect in distinct ways how people inhabit, view, and think about the city.

In addition to the variety of ways in which the city has been conceptualized in different epochs, the vast social changes that Britain has experienced, particularly since the nineteenth century, argu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Twenty-First-Century British Fiction and the City
• 2. “Why Should You Go Out?”: Encountering the City in Monica Ali’s Brick Lane
• 3. The Cosmopolitan Potential of Urban England?: Jon McGregor’s If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things
• 4. “We Exist Only in the Reflection of Others”: Imagining London’s History in Bernardine Evaristo’s The Emperor’s Babe
• 5. Gated Communities and Dystopia in J.G. Ballard’s Super-Cannes
• 6. Celetoids and the City: Tabloidization of the Working Class in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth and Martin Amis’ Lionel Asbo: State of England
• 7. Belonging and Un-belonging in London: Representations of Home in Diana Evans’ 26a
• 8. Between Urban Ecology and Social Construction: Environment and the Ethics of Representation in Zadie Smith’s NW
• 9. The Queer Gothic Spaces of Contemporary Glasgow: Louise Welsh’s The Cutting Room
• 10. Convulsions of the Local: Contemporary British Psychogeographical Fiction
• 11. Trauma, Negativities, and the City in Trezza Azzopardi’s Remember Me
• Back Matter