Abstract
ABSTRACT This article explores affective narratives of migrants in a recent Brexit fiction in the context of feanxiety – a critical concept that brings together literary representations of fear and anxiety. The essay focuses on Agnieszka Dale’s short stories collection Fox Season and Other Short Stories (2017), which represents the social and affective experiences of Eastern European migrants living in post-Brexit Britain. Written after the 2016 referendum, the collection engages with issues of belonging and (un)belonging, national attachments, and postcolonial relations in the United Kingdom. Reading three short stories from the collection, ‘A Polish Joke’, ‘Fox Season’, and ‘A Happy Nation’, this article investigates how through comedy, humour, and distanced attitude Dale’s fiction fights detrimental prejudices about ‘fearsome foreigners’, reclaiming the lost agency of the migrants. This article argues that in Fox Season feanxiety operates as an aesthetic and an ethical mode but also as a political measure that operates within the modern power structures. Examining the experiences of migration through the lens of fear and anxiety not only enables a nuanced reading of the collection’s outlook on negative emotions surging in the UK but also facilitates a furthering of feanxiety as a productive critical framework within the merit of affect studies.
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