123422 SE Literary & Cultural Studies Seminar / BA Paper / MA British/Irish/New English (2021S)

When COVID-19 started to spread at the beginning of 2020, most governments reacted by imposing a range of restrictions to slow the spread of the virus. Chief among these restrictions was putting societies into lockdown. Slightly later than their neighbouring European countries and amidst a hot debate about their necessity, the UK installed lockdown measures starting on 23 March 2020.

One effect of staying at home in self-isolation was that people turned to reading, specifically fiction titles, an activity that enabled those affected to both escape their four walls and “understand what is happening around us, how to overcome this and how to make our lives better in the future” (Charlton). It is no surprise, then, that authors rushed to publish the first novel dealing with the pandemic. Peter May’s thriller Lockdown, published in April 2020 and set in a London under strict curfew, allegedly is the first English COVID-19 novel.

In the seminar, we will explore this new genre of the lockdown narrative and connect it with a second recent genre emerging in Britain, BrexLit, i.e. fiction titles that deal with the Brexit referendum and its aftermath. In our discussion, we will ask:

1. Read alongside each other, what are similarities and differences in these two corpora when it comes to the experience of Britain as a home space?
   
2. How do these two genres employ metaphors of enclosure, contagion, isolation, or defence in their narratives?
   
3. How do these narratives connect Britain as a homeland with new experiences of the private home during the lockdown, given that home turned into a space which people were forced not to leave rather than being a cosy space of retreat?
   
4. Who is included, who is excluded in these home spaces?
   

The seminar will also include our own experiences with lockdown measures and new experiences of home in sessions that include creative writing, so be prepared to engage in creative methods of analysis and exploration in the course.