Rewriting the North Contemporary British Fiction and the Cultural Politics of Devolution

"This book shows how twenty-first-century writing about Northern England imagines alternative democratic futures for the region and the English nation, signalling the growing awareness of England as a distinct and variegated political formation. The 2016 Brexit vote intensified ongoing constitutional tensions throughout the UK since the devolution of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland in 1997. At the same time, British devolution developed a distinctively cultural registration as a surrogate for parliamentary representation and an attempt to disrupt the status of London as Britain's cultural epicentre. Rewriting the North shifts this debate in a new direction, examining Northern literary preoccupation with devolution's constitutional implications. Through close readings of six contemporary authors - Sunjeev Sahota, Sarah Hall, Anthony Cartwright, Adam Thorpe, Fiona Mozley, and Sarah Moss - this book argues that literary engagement with the North emphasises the limits of devolution as regional political agency, calling instead for an urgent abandonment of the British centralised state form"--