Introduction: Brexit!

Abstract

Eurosceptic dreams of an independent UK and nightmares of faceless EU bureaucrats are not confined to the world of politics, public opinion and the media. Those tropes have also found their way into the literary domain. From 1973 till now, around a dozen novels about the European integration project have been published in Britain. The first chapter introduces the corpus of eight novels which have been selected for closer analysis. Published between 1987 and 2012, they cover the period between the establishment of the European Union and Cameron’s announcement of the In/Out-referendum and can be assigned to the Eurosceptic tradition. The chapter gives an overview over the academic literature on British Euroscepticism, British Eurosceptic discourses and British fiction about the EU. It outlines the historical and discursive background, against which the novels have to be read, focusing on the Eurosceptic discursive tradition. The chapter further introduces key concepts, representational strategies and discourse analytical tools by Anderson, Foucault, Hall, Hobsbawm and Laclau/Mouffe as well as the defining features of dystopian literature. Thus equipped with a toolbox to examine how the novels not only reflect but also exaggerate prevailing Eurosceptic discourses, i.e. representing the EU as a nightmarish dys-EUtopia, the chapter finally develops a four-type-classification scheme, which is apt to systematically capture the different strengths of literary Euroscepticism.