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, âThe history of the city in literature is as lengthy and rich as the histories of literature and cities themselvesâ (2014b, p. 1), the particular history of Britain arguably has created a literature that treats the city in distinctive ways. Most notably, Britainâs experiences with industrialization, colonialism, post-colonialism, global capitalism, and the European Union (EU) have had a marked influence on British ideas about and British literatureâs 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, âExploring the interplay of urban environments and human behavior is one of the things that city literature does bestâ (p. 5). At the same time, literary interest in the city has often also served as a valuable âpart of the documentary record of urban thoughtâ (p. 6) and, more specifically, as a means of âchronicl[ing] the advantages and disadvantages of urban existenceâ (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, âThe 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 populationsâ of many British cities (McNamara 2014b, p. 8). 1 For example, according to Michael Perfect, 2011 census data indicated that â37 per cent of Londonersâsome three million peopleâwere born in a foreign countryâ (2014, p. 4). Not surprisingly, âurban cores are primary destinations for historic and contemporary migrationâ (Hall 2015, p. 856) for numerous reasonsâincluding, 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 immigrantsâ or migrantsâ 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 Powellâs 1968 ânow infamous ârivers of bloodâ speech warning against the dangers of immigrationâ (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, âthe everyday movement, mixing and exchangeâ of large numbers of people necessarily âsaturates and transforms urban spacesâ (Hall 2015, p. 854). One relevant urban studies analysis of census data in England and Wales indicates that âthere 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 2011â (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 centuryâincluding increasing association with âdecay, poverty, social malaise, civil unrestâ (Hall 2002, p. 12)âas a consequence of âThe deterioration in the economic bases of Britainâs citiesâ (Lawless 1986, p. 24). Redevelopment and regeneration projects stemmed at least in part from âa new emphasis on quality in the urban environmentâ (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-whitesâparticularly among the children of immigrants. As Phil Jones and James Evans document, âFor the decade leading up to 2008, towns and cities across the UK were undergoing a series of dramatic reconfigurationsâ that âprofoundly transformed aspects of urban lifeâboth the way towns and cities look and how we live in themâ: âIn the 1980s city centres were not places where people lived, while today exclusive flats and apartments in urban cores are fashionableâ (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 âthe middle classes are increasingly occupying a diverse range of neighbourhoods,â to the extent that it has become clear that the middle classes are highly heterogeneous (BacquĂ© 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 classesâwith 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 âSystems of walls and class division are deeply ingrained in historic Europe as a means of wealthy people protecting themselves,â gated communities in twenty-first-century British city centers and suburbs are firmly anchored in a contemporary âdiscourse of urban fear [that] encodes other social concerns including class, race, and ethnic exclusivityâ and that creates ânew forms of exclusion and residential segregationâ (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: âCities are never finished objectsâ (Jones and Evans 2013, p. 2). Whether viewed as âan evolving organism,â as in the early twentieth-century work of âthe Chicago School of urban sociologistsâ (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 âconcepts about âthe cityâ or about âurban livingââ that are historically and âculturally specificâ (Finnegan 1998, p. 3), so that conceptualizations of cities vary greatly. For example, âEnlightenment thoughtâ conceived of âthe city as a way of controlling nature for the purpose of bringing wealth into beingâ by âEmphasizing the power of reason and technologyâ and privileging âthe principle of natural rights rather than birthrightsâ (Lehan 1998, p. 285). The early twentieth century saw the rise of âthe modernistsâ visionâ of the city as âan atomistic and fragmented space.â More recently, âpostmodernâ conceptualizations of the city view it as âlabyrinthine enigma,â âphysical manifestation of a culture of consumerist excess,â and/or âpalimpsest of histories and narrative evoked in the psyche of the observerâ (Bentley 2014, pp. 175, 176). At the same time, the contemporary postcolonial city often is characterized in terms of âdebate, motion, movement, and interactionâ (Herbert 2014, p. 213) and/or as âsite of continuous exchange, economic and monetary, as well as linguistic and culturalâ (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...