“The little links are broke”: Ethnocentrism and Englishness in contemporary British fiction

Abstract

Abstract This article contrasts three different ways of understanding contemporary British communal life: interpretive accounts based on quantitative political science which stress division and rising ethnocentrism; an account drawing on Arendtian political theory, which again stresses division and loneliness; and accounts developed from three very different contemporary novels: Sarah Moss’s Ghost Wall (2018); Barney Farmer’s Drunken Baker (2018); Bernard Cornwell’s, Warlord (2020). Each explores the current bleak state of the UK in different ways.