Nostalgia is the English Disease' — or is it? Jonathan Coe's Middle England (2018)

Abstract

In common understanding, nostalgia is a past-oriented attitude that makes people turn their backs on the present and glorify former times. It leads to a self-indulgent 'ossification' of one's thoughts and results in escapism and the break with contemporary reality. Jonathan Coe's Middle England, one of the first English Brexit novels, is deeply steeped in the past and in certain forms of nostalgia that greatly contribute to the novel's overall atmosphere. One of these forms, the hankering after England's glorious past and the lost Empire, may easily be related to Brexit. This type of nostalgia, however, which contributed to England's leaving of the European Union, is only one form of nostalgia which Coe makes use of. What I want to show is that there is another type of nostalgia in the novel that is future-oriented and filled with positive social and psychological energies. It is this type of nostalgia that characterizes most of Coe's protagonists and that is responsible for the structure of his novel.