Satire, Identity and State-Of-The-Nation Novels in Jonathan Coe’S Fiction

UNIVERSITATEA DIN CRAIOVA FACULTATEA DE LITERE ȘCOALA DOCTORALĂ „ALEXANDRU PIRU”

SATIRE, IDENTITY AND STATE-OF-THE-NATION NOVELS IN JONATHAN COE’S FICTION

SUMMARY

Îndrumător științific: Prof. Univ. Dr. OLARU Victor

Doctorand, ȚACU Andreea Daniela

CRAIOVA 2020 SATIRE, IDENTITY AND STATE-OF-THE-NATION NOVELS IN JONATHAN COE’S FICTION

SUMMARY

In his essay, The Paradox of Satire, Jonathan Coe argued that “if you could not cleanse the world of its deformities, you could at least laugh at them” (Coe 2013: 3435). Coe’s novels are often regarded as satirical accounts of contemporary Britain, wrapped in what foreign audiences identify as the English sense of humour. Over the last five decades, Britain has experienced radical political, social and economic changes, from the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979 to the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union in 2017. This period of tension and concern permeated literature and was translated into a series of political novels regarded by the critics as contemporary state-of-the-nation fiction. Jonathan Coe is considered one of the harshest critics of British recent history and his poetic perspective on life is remarkably tied to the historical circumstances of Great Britain during the last decades. The combination of literariness with humour and wry observations about politics and society is probably what helped him achieve great critical recognition as well as commercial success. However, we find it quite surprising that Coe’s fiction has prompted rather little serious academic discussions, beyond some assertions related to his technical artistry or to the political aspect of his novels.

There is no doubt that the satirical discourse is the main ingredient in almost all of Jonathan Coe’s novels. From the first satirical works of fiction, the writers have written not only to reveal a personal indignation regarding a certain aspect of their contemporary societies, but mostly with a clear sense of ethical concern for the public interest, aiming to dissolve the inequities and abuses, to expose the faults of the society that needed to be corrected. If satire has historically been used as a means of disproving those in authority, this artistic expression evolved over time, reflecting the mentality of the context in which the satiric work was written. A very wide concept, which made it a real challenge for the literary critics to clearly define, satire encapsulates several characteristics. The two most important components of satire, humour and ethics, persisted over the years, from Aristophanes to contemporary writers. Comedy became an essential ingredient in the process of creating efficient satires, and in Jonathan Coe’s fiction comedy is translated in the form of dark 2

humour, irony, sarcasm, cynicism, leading to a different kind of laughter, bleaker and wrapped in nostalgia and melancholy. Postmodern satirical novels envision the protagonists as allegorical representations of the vices in the contemporary society and they have the tendency to depict a rather dystopic panorama of the world.

Although satire is the core of most of Jonathan Coe’s novels, what immediately drew our attention was the fact that his fictional works are not restricted to mere political and social criticism, but they deeply reveal the complexity of the postmodern condition and expose the characters’ inabilities to react to the dilemmas posed by postmodern times. Moreover, we observed a very close relationship between satire and identity, translated in a mutual influence between satirical devices and identity construction, by means of opposition and otherness.

Our research encompasses an interdisciplinary approach to literary criticism, aesthetics, literary stylistics, cultural studies, politics and studies of identity, and the analysis is theoretically inscribed in the framework of discourse analysis around postmodernity. Our interpretations rely heavily on the studies of Fredric Jameson, Linda Hutcheon, Brian McHale, Terry Eagleton, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Lance Olsen and Patricia Waugh. The theoretical discussions around the issues of identity and identity formation are based on the scientific works of Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud, as well as on the very recent study of Massih Zekavat Satire, Humour and the Construction of Identities. Since our research left behind the concept(s) of identity and/or otherness defined in relation to colonialism, the studies of Edward Said did not represent a priority and were not approached in the process of analysis.

As the title of the thesis suggests, this study is devoted to analysing the literary works of Jonathan Coe, a contemporary novelist whose satirical socio-political fiction encapsulates some particular features of postmodernism and illustrates a sort of shift in today’s satirical fiction, marked by a proclivity to highlight human vulnerabilities in order to expose broader social and political vices.

The subject of our investigation is an in-depth analysis of six selected works by Jonathan Coe, What a Carve Up! (1994), The House of Sleep (1997), The Rotters’ Club (2001), The Closed Circle (2004), Number 11 ─ Or Tales that Witness Madness (2015), and Middle England (2018), in the context of contemporary British satire, pointing out the current functions of satirical devices within a postmodern text, the relationship between satire and 3

identity and between satire and state-of-the-nation novels, in order to illustrate both the evolution of satire as a stylistic device and Coe’s contribution towards redefining the contemporary English novel or, as Mellet argued, his contribution to giving a new impulse to the metafictional and postmodern writings (2015: 16). The objective of this research involves the analysis of satire within the postmodern context, in order to determine the efficiency of such stylistic device (or even literary genre) in relation to the current realities generated by postmodernism. Although Coe is also regarded as a realist novelist by some literary critics, his novels are deeply anchored in the logic of chaos specific to postmodern fiction, due to the intentional fragmentation of his writings, the multiple genres mixed together in complex plots which feature intertextuality, narrative loops, multiple perspectives and constant shifts in time and space.

Throughout the thesis, we adopt various research methods. However, a combination of non-structured qualitative analysis and structured quantitative analysis governs most of our research. Generally, the methodologies applied in our study derive from textual criticism, mostly inscribed in contemporary and postmodern literary theories.

Starting from a more general framework, marked by our intention to (re)define the concept of satire and to trace back Jonathan Coe’s literary influence, and closely moving on towards more specific issues, embodied by the use of satire as a means of approaching socio- political problems and by the relationship between satire and identity, our main research questions run as follows:

1. How did the poetics of satire change from Jonathan Coe’s first political novel to his later satirical works? 2. What is the effect of satire and comic forms in depicting contemporary Britain? 3. Is it of any help to write a novel about the political difficulties in an already unstable society? Can satire actually lead to a positive change or it just makes things worse? If comic forms usually distract from the potential sadness of the situation, does it mean that satire distances the readers from the brutality of real life, dissolving anger and preventing them from taking action? 4. Is there any close relationship between satire and identity within a postmodern literary work, given the fact that both concepts are present in almost all walks of contemporary life?

5. Can the mechanisms of satire contribute to the formation of social and individual identities? 6. What is the role of satire in writing state-of-the-nation novels?

The critical reception of Jonathan Coe’s novels is also an important focal point in the research process, predominantly throughout the first part of the thesis. We analyse, compare and contrast critical reviews from different social and cultural backgrounds, focusing especially on British, Spanish and Romanian criticism. As we have already mentioned, what surprised us from the beginning was that Jonathan Coe’s fiction has attracted quite little academic research, although the writer received a lot of public attention after the publication of What a Carve Up! (1994). It even seems that his novels were better received by the common readers in continental Europe than in the United Kingdom. Consequently, the number of critical materials was very scarce, consisting of only three books dedicated exclusively to the analysis of Coe’s novels, two of which are designed as introductory guides to his novels; two PhD dissertations and one collection of critical essays.

Therefore, in supporting and proving our hypothesis, we approach a corpus-based analysis and we also rely on a great number of interviews with the author, to supplement the lack of critical material. Accordingly, the research methods consist of interpreting and comparing primary sources. Biographical and historical materials are also used in order to establish the social and political climate in which Jonathan Coe wrote. The results are supported with a number of critical essays on the author and with several periodicals which deal specifically with the subject of politics in the United Kingdom.

The major limitation of the thesis is the necessity of restricting the number of novelists selected for the investigation. There are many contemporary writers who have approached the issue of politics and dismissal of the welfare state in a satirical manner in their literary works, nevertheless we have chosen to focus only on Jonathan Coe’s political fiction, because of the writer’s contribution to the postmodern novel and to satire in general.

A second limitation is the need to restrict the number of novels to be discussed. In an attempt to analyse the effects of satire in novels written at times of dissatisfaction and political difficulty, we have opted to focus on Coe’s satirical novels that are most connected and that cover similar or consecutive historical periods. Also, we do not focus on narratological aspects of Coe’s novels if they are not specifically related to satire and/or identity. 5

We acknowledge the fact that Coe’s novels which haven’t been thoroughly analysed may also share similar characteristics and could have been relevant for our analysis, however we decided to restrict the number of works and refer only to those that were already connected, like the Rotters’ trilogy or the duology composed by What a Carve Up! and Number 11.

The present thesis, Satire, Identity and State-of-the-Nation Novels in Jonathan Coe’s Fiction, is numerically organised into five main chapters, alongside the Introduction and the Conclusion sections. Each of the five chapters is divided into a number of subchapters, according to the investigated subtopics. Therefore, the structure of the thesis covers two important parts, one theoretical and one applied. The theoretical part comprises the first two chapters and it is intended to provide the necessary background for the study, in relation to Jonathan Coe’s fictional works and the concept of satire. The following three chapters represent literary analyses on some of the most representative novels by Jonathan Coe, and they investigate the manifestations of satire in his fiction, the relationship between satire and identity in the formation of individual and social identities, and the connection between satire and state-of-the-nation fiction, respectively.

The Introduction provides the rationale of choosing this research topic, the theoretical framework of the thesis, as well as a brief summary of the main research issues, organised by chapters. Here, we also set up the methodological background of our study, the working hypothesis, and the research methods and techniques.

Chapter One, Jonathan Coe’s Literary, Cultural and Spiritual Universe, is the first theoretical chapter and it provides an outline of Jonathan Coe’s literature within a historical and theoretical context, pointing out the novelist’s thematic preoccupation with history, politics and social and personal identities. The chapter is divided into five subchapters which present, in a chronological order, aspects of Coe’s personal and professional life, and it places the novelist’s works within a theoretical framework. Throughout the chapter, our aim is to cover the most important details regarding the background of Coe’s fiction and the influences that shaped the novelist’s literary style, as well as to provide a brief presentation of all his novels, since many of them have received very little or no attention at all from the critics. Also, contextualising the author within a cultural and literary framework is a prime focus, because placing his fiction under one label has been a difficult task for the critics since the very beginning. However, a sort of common denominator of most of the classifications made

by the critics is that Jonathan Coe can be inscribed under the label of contemporary satirist and postmodern writer. As opposed to the traditional satirical writings, it is obvious that in his novels, Coe wandered more about the ability of satire to change things, and not only to distract the readers. Satire and humour are strongly connected, however, in the case of Coe’s literature, satire is more ethical than moralising, which is why it appeals to the readers’ empathy. Also, satire differs from humour, since it advocates a better world, it is endowed with a moral purpose.

Moreover, throughout the chapter we explore the social aspect of Coe’s novels in order to point out the writer’s interest in aspects of identity, which we consider they are related to satire as well. The protagonists in Jonathan Coe’s novels are the result of the society they inhabit and of the politics of the United Kingdom over several generations, and this is probably why Coe decided to attribute a special aim for each of the protagonists within the narrative, aim which generally contributes to the formulation of satirical commentaries. Our analysis reveals the writer’s unique ability to depict the current crisis of both national identity and personal identity, offering a multi-layered image of a nation bent on self- immolation.

The critical reception of Jonathan Coe’s fiction is also dealt with in the first part, and it is shown that his novels generally received brief but positive remarks. There are few literary critics that approached Coe’s fiction in complex critical works, the most resonant names being Philip Tew, Dominic Head, Vanessa Guignery and Pamela Thurschwell. Guignery and Thruschwell also wrote the first two extensive studies on the fictional work of this author: Jonathan Coe (2016) and Understanding Jonathan Coe (2016), respectively. Throughout the section dedicated to the critical analysis of Coe’s fiction, we also pay closer attention to the two doctoral theses on Coe’s works, by Francesco di Bernardo (2014) and Denisa Dumitrascu (2012), both being concerned almost exclusively with the political dimension of his novels. Lastly, we briefly outline Coe’s connection with Romania, not only because most of his novels have been translated in Romanian, but also because the novelist has visited this country multiple times and Romania represented a source of inspiration in creating symbolic characters in some of his novels, like the character Livia in Number 11.

The second chapter, Satire in Fiction. Means o Approaching Social and Political Aspects, provides a complex discussion on some current theorising on satire, from a chronological approach. The chapter concentrates on four main aspects, each one being

analysed in a different subchapter. The first subchapter, “What’s in a name?” is meant to establish a clearer definition of the concept by outlining the most important theoretical background related to satire and satiric devices, paying more attention to the aspects of satire that are present in Coe’s fiction and that are relevant for the further analysis. The investigation covers the most important details regarding the history of satire and refers to several dictionary definitions of the concept. The subchapter reveals that satire represents not just a literary mode or a stylistic device, but an artistic expression carefully placed at the merging point of two semiotic systems, the literary and the social, which is based on a clear set of moral values, whose purpose is to highlight, attack and censure the follies of the society, in order to deconstruct them and sway the readers towards an ideal alternative.

The second subchapter, The Ethics and Aesthetics of Satire, revolves around the idea that satire can be considered a communicative strategy. In this respect, we establish a scheme for the satirical creation, inspired by Roman Jakobson’s system and by Lázaro Lafuente’s study on satire, which is meant to show that satire is a sort of communicative strategy because of its ethical aim to reform the society and its double nature to both entertain and criticise. In our proposed scheme of satire functioning as a communicative strategy, the satirical text develops the function of the channel and constitutes the connection between the satirist (as the sender), and the reader (as the receiver). Moreover, the efficiency of the satirical message is supported by the aesthetic component of the text, through the use of literary devices as irony, parody, sarcasm, which soften the aggressivity of the satirical attack. Aristotle’s three modes of persuasion or ethical strategies, the ethos, the pathos and the logos, are also referred to in this subchapter. Also, in relation to the aesthetics of the satiric process, our analysis covers the theories of Emil Draitser, who compared the aesthetics of satire to the distorting mirrors, explaining that the satirists disturb their readers by showing them the world in a distorted mirror, so that they could see themselves and laugh at their own image. Therefore, the aesthetic purpose of satire merges with the ethical one, resulting in a work of art that both educates and entertains. Mikhail Bakhtin’s carnivalesque tradition is also related to satire, because it is based on the Menippean Satire, which characterises by attacking mental attitudes instead of specific individuals. In the same vein, but a few decades before, Valle-Inclán talked about Esperpento and defined the social and political decadence of his times by reflecting it in some concave mirrors, creating a grotesque and misshapen art, of a hallucinatory realism. Hence, both theories perceive reality not directly, but in the light of a reflection. In Jonathan Coe’s fiction, some reminiscence of these theories can be noticed, 8

and the mirror becomes one of the main motifs in two of his novels, What a Carve Up! (1994) and Number 11 (2015), a means to reinforce the issue of social fragmentation and at the same time a satirical device.

The last two subchapters, Satirical Devices and The (In)efficiency of Satire, are focussed on defining and briefly illustrating the most important satirical instruments employed in Jonathan Coe’s fiction, from a theoretical point of view. Since the efficiency of such a literary device or a literary genre has been many times questioned recently, the chapter concludes with pointing out the main ingredients which the success of a satirical work of fiction depends on. Therefore, we argue that the efficiency of satire depends on the one hand on the context, because readers need to understand the subtext in order to get the deeper meaning of the satiric work, and on the other hand on the readers’ reception of the text and the commitment of the writer. The commitment of the writer is based on the ethical and the rhetorical component of the literary text. Usually, the satirists employ a pretended objectivity in their texts, by presenting the situation from the subjective angle of a character, indirectly highlighting the deficiencies that the writer intends to criticise. Since the publication of a literary work is, essentially, an act of communication, any writer seeks to impose his or her convictions on the society. The writer’s commitment represents the genuine devotion of the writer to a cause and it implies a clear stand in a specific issue that arises out of a deep consciousness of the multiple dimensions concerning that problem. The intensity of the commitment arises from the sense of moral devotion of the writer. In the case of satires, we could say that the writer’s commitment is conceived as a social and political activity. Conversely, satire may result ineffective if it has no impact on the readers, or when it is mistargeted and afflicts the already afflicted.

Chapter Three, Manifestations of Satire in Jonathan Coe’s “What a Carve Up!” and “Number 11”, the first applied chapter, is an in-depth analysis of two of Coe’s most important novels What a Carve Up! (1994) and Number 11, or Tales that Witnessed Madness (2015), in relation to the comic forms used as satirical devices. The chapter is structured into three parts, the first one providing the theoretical background and outlining Jonathan Coe’s satirical fiction, which oscillates between traditional narrative forms and postmodern inventivity, in order to point out the main manifestations of satire. We start from the idea that one of the most important features of comedy in Jonathan Coe’s satirical fiction is the tendency to deliberately expose the characters’ sensitivity, to reveal a permanent layer of

human vulnerability, in order to analyse the way in which the exposure of frailty as a manifestation of dark humour can aim for a moral reformation of the subject. The second part of the chapter focuses on the analysis of What a Carve Up! in relation to the strong connection between satire and dark humour, more precisely, in which way dark humour is more efficient for the satiric process than a mere comical exposure of the issues that the author hopes to be corrected. Our attention concentrates also on the idea of employing satire with the purpose of achieving poetic justice. In literature, poetic justice refers to the way in which a vice is punished in an ironic manner, supporting the idea that literature should advocate for moral principles and that it should instruct the readers in appropriate moral behaviour. In this respect, our analysis tries to clarify if Jonathan Coe uses satire only to depict the faults of the British ruling classes, to raise people’s awareness and highlight the absurdity of the contemporary society, or if he also indulged in illustrating the recent events in order to get revenge against the abuser represented by the political classes, to provide a sort of catharsis?

The last part of the chapter focuses on the novel Number 11 and intends to shed light on the way in which Coe’s literary style has changed from the publication of What a Carve Up! to the publication of Number 11, since the latter is regarded as a sequel. Our focus is on the new literary devices Coe employed in the novel, like dark irony and magic realism, and we try to analyse their function in constructing satirical commentaries.

Both What a Carve Up! and Number 11 are considered satirical and sometimes cruel portraits of the corrupt ruling classes in the United Kingdom, full of corrosive humour and irony. While What a Carve Up! illustrates a pre-Brexit environment, Number 11 is regarded to have a prophetic quality, since, in some ways, it anticipated Brexit. Starting from the idea that the writer’s tendency to deliberately expose the characters’ vulnerabilities by means of dark humour and irony represents one of the most important features of comedy in Coe’s fiction, this chapter reveals the way in which these devices can lead to a moral reform of the subject. On the one hand, satire and comic forms lead to a detachment from the collective traumas, but on the other hand they provide a sort of diffuse way to explore the ethical dimension of writing.

In the case of Jonathan Coe’s novels, satire and comic forms gain a new dimension. If in most literary works humour brought about a sense of intimacy, in Coe’s fiction it isolates the characters and highlights their personal difficulties, as a response to the disorientation and

confusion that surrounds them, to the lack of control and the ambiguity specific to the postmodern era. Having parallelly analysed both What a Carve Up! and Number 11, we have come to the conclusion that while in the first novel Coe made use of more direct satirical devices with the clear aim to manipulate the readers into agreeing with his personal perspective, in Number 11 the novelist became preoccupied with establishing more obscure power connections, and satire became thus wrapped up in cynicism and felt a bit bleaker. Moreover, the analysis of both novels shows that in order for satire to be efficient, to be used as a tactical weapon for political subversion, the satirist and the audience must possess the same set of values and political expectations. Notwithstanding, in many cases, comedy generated though satirical devices may become an obstruction to real social change, because laughter dissolves anger instead of bringing about action. From this point of view, satire only provides a safe space where people with the same system of values can gather together in comfortable laughter.

Chapter Four, Satire and the Construction of Identity, represents a shift in our focus, from the predominant attention to the political and social aspects of the society and the way they have been exposed to criticism in Coe’s novels, to an in-depth analysis of characters’ identity formation through satirical devices. The main focus of this chapter is to cover the gap in the academic research of Jonathan Coe’s literature, related to the relationship between the mechanisms of satire and the construction of social and individual identities, through the lens of the interdependent relationship between the Self and the Other. The theoretical framework of the chapter will be based on the very recent study of Massih Zekavat Satire, Humour and the Construction of Identities (2017), in which the author provided an extensive analysis on the mechanisms through which satire contributes to the formation of racial, ethnic, religious, national, and gender identities, through the opposition between self and others, starting from the idea that, “since othering is the prerequisite of identity construction, then satire can construct the identities of social subjects or contribute to the process” (Zekavat 2017: 4). The corpus for our analysis will be the novels What a Carve Up! (1994) and The House of Sleep (1997), since in both novels the protagonists define and redefine their identities based on the dichotomies of power and subordination, and of superiority and weakness, established through their relationship with the external world.

In our analysis, we started from the hypothesis that there is an interdependent relationship established between satire and identity in some of Jonathan Coe’s novels,

because the way in which the author employs satirical devices in order to plead his case, indirectly influences the psychological construction of the characters and the outlined society. We referred to What a Carve Up! and The House of Sleep as the corpus for analysis, because in both novels there are some clear shifts from the general political and social background (which was very specific in What a Carve Up!) to the traumatic psychological experiences of the protagonists and their impossibility to properly communicate with each other or to establish any strong boundaries among each other. We observed that, on the one hand, the writer employs satirical devices which indirectly affect the formation of individual and social identities, without aiming directly to reshape them, but on the other hand, the actual process of developing characters’ identities is used as a means of introducing satirical commentaries.

Theories on postmodern identity illustrate the self as both fragmented and fluid and the postmodern persona as a sort of combination of many selves, of many conflicting parts. Hegel argued that identity can be defined in terms of binaries, that the representation of the Other is an essential component of the perception of the Self; Bauman explained that identities are set up as dichotomies, that the concept of Otherness is important to the way in which societies established identity categories; and more recently, Zekavat concluded that if Othering is a prerequisite of identity construction, then satire, which defines the satiric object as different from the accepted norm, can also contribute to the formation of identities by means of bipolarities which presuppose otherness. Therefore, the novel What a Carve Up! illustrates Michael Owen’s psychological development from the passive figure to the writer of his own story, gradually presenting the shifts from internal focalisation to external focalisation, and paying close attention to the protagonist’s liminal stage, marked by his self- imposed isolation and loss of a sense of self. Michael’s identity is changed and redefined through the interactions with Fiona, who forces him to abandon the solipsistic world of simulacra on television, to dare a direct encounter with the Other. In Michael’s case, the Other can be either the new political system, epitomised by the Winshaw family which drastically changes his life, but also by his own persona, his past self. In The House of Sleep, our focus was on more characters, since all throughout the novel all the protagonists defined and redefined their identities. Otherness takes multiple forms and is represented either by the new system or by the characters themselves, for being different and not fitting the norms. The analysis of both novels focused on two recurrent motifs, the mirror and the dream, functioning as in-between spaces, as borderlines separating reality from illusion. In The House of Sleep, the symbol of the dream plays a paramount role in the relationship between 12

people, based on the dichotomies of power and subordination, and of superiority and weakness, since it is paradoxically envisioned both as a weakness and as a strength, a reward. Also, the protagonists’ obsessive and pathologic relations with sleep blur the dimensions of human consciousness and reinforce the issue of social fragmentation common in postmodern novels. Both in What a Carve Up! and in The House of Sleep the dream and the mirror stage represent phases in the process of self-discovery, and the satirical devices employed, like irony, dark humour, parody, cynicism, are based on the dichotomies power and weakness, and reality and illusion, and function in a similar way to the self-other dynamics, strongly influencing the construction of individual and social identities.

Chapter Five, Satire and State-of-the-Nation Novels, aims to define the concept of state-of-the-nation fiction and illustrate its features in relation to Jonathan Coe’s trilogy, composed by The Rotters’ Club (2001), The Closed Circle (2004) and Middle England (2018), novels which constitute a complete panoramic view of Britain, a sort of big puzzle that covers the last five decades in the history of the United Kingdom. Throughout the three parts of the chapter, we try to point out the novelist’s unique form of humour ─ the trademark of his literature ─ related here to the ruthless assessment of the past as a sustaining illusion, and we intend to identify the way in which it connects with the postmodern state-of-the- nation novel. Each of the three parts of the chapter will deal with a different novel, covering in a chronological way the last almost fifty years in the history of Britain.

This chapter of the thesis is mostly intended to question the significance and the role of state-of-the-nation novels in relation to current realities, and it aims to ponder over the question “when the society is rolling downhill, how can reading a novel help the people?”. State-of-the-nation fiction, as satire, inevitably revolves around contemporary social and political problems. While satire illustrates a tendency to fantasize about an ideal future and refers to the good old times as better examples, in an obviously glamourized way, state-of- the-nation novels reveal a sort of fixation on the past, covered in nostalgia. Moreover, satire is a recurrent tool in the writing of state-of-the-nation fiction, therefore, throughout the chapter, we try to point out the features of Coe’s novels which connect postmodern state-of- the-nation novels with the different types of humour the writer employed in order to introduce political or social criticism.

The first subchapter, The Rotters’ Club – A Gloomy Reflection of the ‘70s in England, analyses the novel The Rotters’ Club (2001) in relation to the four most important aspects of

Britain’s social and political life: class war and conflict in industry, the rise of extremism in the political life, the sharp decline in the economy of the country, as well as the rise of the domestic and public violence.

The second subchapter, The Closed Circle – A Narrative Tapestry of the New Millennium, is dedicated to the analysis of second novel in the trilogy, surprising the transition towards the New Millennium. We thoroughly discuss three of the main socio- political situations present in the novel: the junction of the private sphere with the public one, marked by an overlapping of the microcosmos and the macrocosmos, the formation of the “third way” in relation to the way in which Britain’s politics changed at the dawn of the new millennium, and the role that mass-media and popular culture play in the social and personal lives of the individuals. The second novel in the trilogy portrays the bleak reality of the dreams that never came true, it is a brilliant articulation of the outright complexity of the goals that drive people and that sometimes effect in powerful events. A sense of great disillusionment is perceived all throughout the novel, which could be perceived as the reflection of the writer’s own sense of dismay at the time. In this section, we also pay close attention to the way in which satire and the inclusion of some farcical scenes contribute to lowering the bleak tone triggered by the political issues, like the rise of the nationalism or the National Front and some other racist parties in Britain.

The last part of the chapter, Middle England – A Political Allegory, analyses Jonathan Coe’s latest novel, which was published in 2018, while this PhD thesis was already in progress. Hence, the inclusion of the novel was decided later in our research process. This subchapter is dedicated to the analysis of the way in which Jonathan Coe decided to approach the Brexit issue within the novel, making use of different satirical devices in order to provide the satirical (and political) commentaries for all the key aspects related to Brexit. Our analysis focuses on three story lines, marked by Benjamin’s relationship between his professional life and his personal affairs, the marriage of Sophie and Ian, which becomes a sort of metaphor for Brexit, and the casual conversations and meetings between Nigel and Douglas, which encompass more directly the political criticism in the novel. Middle England portrayed from every angle what was and was not debated in the outcome of the Brexit referendum. Although the novel is still somehow focused on the life of Benjamin Trotter and his friends and family, we can argue that Middle England is more like a collection of small episodes meant to make a more complex puzzle of the situation that generated Brexit, rather

than having a definite, clear plotline. The novel serves as a conclusion for the first one in the trilogy, in a sense that it provides answers to several questions raised by the adolescents in The Rotters’ Club. Notwithstanding, regardless the sad and bleak tone that penetrated all three novels, Middle England closes in a more positive spirit, suggesting that in the end, some of the divisions may be healed.

We have observed that there is a very close connection between text and context in all the three novels analysed. The analysis of The Rotters’ Club showed that the writer connects all the historical events depicted, to the individual lives of the characters, suggesting that the victims of any political decision made by the ruling classes (envisioned as a macrocosmos) are generally the common people (who represent the microcosmos). Alongside the collective history of the British society, the novel follows the coming-of-age story of Benjamin Trotter and his relationship with the world, his family and his group of friends. The connection between Ben and his friends’ personal turmoil generated by the transition from adolescence to adulthood and Britain’s own development from Heath’s Conservative government to Margaret Thatcher’s premiership, is established through the metaphor of the school. The school was used as a sort of metaphor for the 1970s society, and the issues occurring within the macrocosmos were projected into the microcosmos. Moreover, in a very particular way, Coe managed to vividly depict the Irish situation in Britain, the problems generated by the strikes of the trade unions, the winter of discontent, and the formation of Thatcherism, casually resorting to sarcastic jokes and dark irony as forms of humour, which reconcile the elements scattered by the use of more serious and acrid satiric devices.

Even though Jonathan Coe’s novels explore vast and varied topics, the element that connects all of his works into a complex tapestry of the recent history of Britain is the comic dimension, many times in the form of satirical devices. Apart from that, our analysis has confirmed that Coe’s novels represent the proof of the postmodern condition through the way in which he illustrated the dilemmas caused by postmodern times, revealing the individuals’ inability to react in the face of problematic situations, even though they are completely aware of the particular socio-political situation.

Our thesis ends with the Conclusions section, which validates the working hypothesis and wrap up our research outcomes. Throughout this part, we summarise the main findings in the light of the research questions, and we provide several personal reflections.

This thesis shows that at the beginning of the 1990s, Jonathan Coe still believed that satire and state-of-the-nation novels could have a positive and remarkable impact on the readers and that they could make the society reflect on the issues, on the seismic transformation that were occurring in the country, and that at the same time the British political classes would develop an appropriate and adequate response to those problems. However, starting with the 21st century, an increasing sense of disappointment regarding the aesthetic impact that political satire could have on the readers started to be noticed. The novelist began to realise that the British tradition of writing satires and state-of-the-nation novels was not bringing any real social changes but could only transform the angry or wistful mood of the people into harmless laughter.

We believe that the present research could represent a reference work both for researchers who display interest in analysing the use of satire in postmodern fiction, as well as for those interested in further analysing Jonathan Coe’s literature. We believe that this thesis can also be a starting point for further investigations on the relationship between satire and identity. To our knowledge, except from our current attempt, there is only one book in English which surveys the literary trend of using humour and satire in identity-building, written by Jill Twark in 2007 and based on German literary texts related to the personal experiences of the characters in the German Democratic Republic and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Given the British tradition of writing satires and employing humour with a moral purpose, and thinking about the current interest in studies of identity, we believe that this topic is worth being further developed.