Edge Landscapes in Post-Millennial British Fiction Rebecca Elizabeth Harris Quigg Phd in English Literature University of East A
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Edge Landscapes in Post-Millennial British Fiction Rebecca Elizabeth Harris Quigg PhD in English Literature University of East Anglia School of Literature, Drama and Creative Writing August 2016 99, 764 words This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived there from must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution. Thesis Abstract Post-millennial Britain is a locus of flux and uncertainty, defined by environmental concerns, fears regarding terrorism, and the destabilisation of European politics on the one hand, and increasing globalisation, liberal approaches to minority groups, and rapid technological advances on the other. The fiction that is being created at this point, in this place, reflects these issues in numerous different manners and through a variety of thematic shifts. One of these developments is a renewed literary interest in British rural landscapes, particularly those landscapes that are in some regard problematic, either literally or figuratively. These landscapes are defined as edges. This project examines the manner in which four novels employ British edge landscapes. Each chapter focuses on a particular novel and a particular landscape type, examining how the landscape functions within the text, and how the novel’s use of its place reflects post-millennial concerns. The project places the novels within a wider context of ecocritical principles and literary criticism, identifying both approaches specific to each individual text and prevailing tendencies that link the corpus. Ultimately the project delineates a preoccupation with uncertainty, and an attendant interest in the depiction of the particular, the individual experience and the local; it interrogates the ethics of this attention and marks the manner in which these texts both represent and remain complicit in the cultural elision of the consequences of human inhabitation in and interaction with their surroundings. The project concludes by considering the manner in which the prevailing concerns of the texts reflect an attention that self-reflexively marks itself as difficult, personal and flawed, and the manner in which the texts reflect environmental concern and insecurity while resisting the urge toward polemical trajectories. Contents Introduction: p.6 The Novel Now: p.21 Green Past, Grey Present, Grim Future: p.34 People in Place: p.53 The Intersection of Vertices: Edges: p.62 Chapter One: p.68 Finding the Way, Knowing the Way: p.84 Losing the Way: p.112 Chapter Two: p.126 The Complicated and Complicating Saltmarsh: p.138 The Location of Danger: p.156 Chapter Three: p.178 Orkney’s Land and Water: p.192 Orkney’s Stories, and the Search for Authenticity: p.211 3 Chapter Four: p.231 The Representation of the Garden in The Children’s Book: p.241 The Post-Millennial Nostalgia of The Children’s Book: p.262 Conclusion: p.282 Bibliography: p.295 Appendix: p.320 4 Acknowledgements A part-time research degree is an extraordinarily long journey, and renders an equally long list of people to whom thanks are due. This is an incomplete, but appreciative, summary. With sincere thanks to: Dr Stephen Benson; whose rigour and compassion have been equally necessary, and equally appreciated. Stephen, your teaching opened my eyes to the possibilities of the contemporary in the first place; now, over a decade later, here we are. Thank you. Tim and Janet Harris; for support financial, practical, academic and emotional; for love, tough and otherwise; for the medicinal application of sea air; for everything. This would not have happened without you: thank you so much for the opportunity. The entire Harris-Bone-Jones-Quigg-Muir clan; I wish that you had all seen it finished— but your support has ensured that it was. I owe you all dinner, and many conversations that do not include the thesis. And last, but never least, Charlie Quigg; we took this very long and often unmade road together, and without your navigational skills (and the occasional piggyback), I would have left it long ago. I look forward, as ever, to the next one. 5 Introduction: ‘A Pervasive Uncertainty’ ‘If only the new millennium had somehow dawned on an earth made magically fresh. Instead we passed that long-awaited midnight on the same planet, tattered with the abuse of the last century’.1 In the eyes of anyone from one hundred years ago, the Great Britain of 2016 cannot fail to seem a very strange place indeed. As I put the finishing touches to this work, the everyday British citizen can pay for transactions on the high street with a tap of a card, transfer money instantly from person to person, video call friends and relatives on the other side of the world, and in general access information on almost any topic under the sun within a few seconds. Peter Childs and James Green call this the ‘unprecedented degree of interconnectedness [of] the last century’;2 ‘interconnectedness’ is an excellent word for the enmeshing quality of the global systems of communication, finance and influence that inform twenty-first century culture. We are connected more intimately and consistently than ever before, both to each other and to the rest of the world. And yet British society is poised at a point of uncertainty, where increasing liberalism and multiculturalism, on the one hand, is faced with an equally proliferating strain of right-wing extremism3 and aggressively conservative insularity.4 A referendum on Britain’s position in the 1 Scott Slovic, Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat, and Ecocritical Responsibility (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2008), p.83. 2 Peter Childs and James Green, Aesthetics and Ethics in Twenty-First Century British Novels (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), p.253. 3 The excellent The New Extremism in 21st Century Britain, edited by Robert Eatwell (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010) is a particularly cogent collective discussion of the mutual rise of extreme right-wing groups like the British National Party and the English Defence League in the context of the growing diversity of British society: most useful in this context are chapters 9 and 10 and the excellent and informative introduction. 4 On UKIP and its crusade for ‘British values’ and independence from the European Union, I recommend Revolt on the Right: Explaining Support for the Radical Right in Britain (ed. Robert Ford and Matthew J. Goodwin (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014)): particularly chapters three, four and five on the social roots of the increase in radical right- wing supporters. 6 European Union, which occurred under two months before this work was due to be completed, has left the country uncertain about its future; an independent Scotland is once again an increasing possibility.5 Our part in the global community, it seems, brings with it a recidivist focus on ‘traditional’ values, and fear of the unknown: Robert Ford particularly highlights, in his examination of the rise of British right-wing extremism, that ‘the popular understanding of British identity continues to incorporate ideas about culture, heritage and religion’ and the pervasive and damaging consequences of ‘perceptions that the distinctive cultural heritage of the ethnic majority group is under threat from migration and multiculturalism’.6 Graham Huggan explicitly links the pressing conflict of these two themes—fear of a loss of national identity and the exciting possibilities of new technologies—to the turn of the century, suggesting that ‘in the run-up to the new millennium…discourses of novelty/innovation (especially those associated with ‘revolutionary’ technologies) jostled for place alongside discourses of nostalgia (for what is ‘Englishness’ after all?)’.7 Hubbard’s ‘discourses of nostalgia’ are evident in many spheres of popular culture, not least the post-millennial resurgence of semi-traditional folk music.8 Andy Letcher has argued that, ‘part of folk’s appeal is that it 5 Chris Gifford’s article on ‘The UK and the European Union: Dimensions of Sovereignty and the Problem of Eurosceptic Britishness’. (Parliamentary Affairs 63.2 (2010): 321- 338) is a good starting point on the challenges surrounding UK sovereignty issues and the EU: particularly the summation of the consequences of Scottish independence on p.328. Since the EU Referendum result on 23 June 2016, the situation has become, if possible, even more febrile and uncertain; how the relationship between Britain and EU develops is, at the point of writing, impossible to predict. 6 Robert Ford, ‘Who might vote for the BNP?: Survey evidence on the electoral potential of the extreme right in Britain’ in The New Extremism in 21st Century Britain, ed. Robert Eatwell (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010), pp.145-169, p.145. 7 Graham Huggan, ‘Virtual Multiculturalism: The Case of Contemporary Britain,’ Britain at the Turn of the 21st Century (Spec. issue of European Studies: A Journal of European Culture, History and Politics) 16 (2001): 67-85, 68. 8 While in part this resurgence has been at the grass-roots level of traditional folk concerts and clubs, it is interesting to note that there has also been a trend towards folk themed chart music, often given a twenty-first century spin to suit contemporary tastes: the so- called ‘nu-folk’ and ‘folk rock’ aspects of the work of groups such as Mumford and Sons 7 confers alterity through identification with tradition and the past. The past tends for the most part to be heavily romanticized as a rustic, pre-industrial or prelapsarian golden age’; Letcher defines folk as ‘something old and other, at odds with modernity and urban living. Most of us now live in towns and cities, but folk music typically expresses a desire for the supposed rooted certainties of the countryside’.9 This yearning to reclaim the ‘supposed rooted certainties’ is not new; but the unique twenty-first century context of Internet-enabled communication, globalisation and economics is.