British Covid Fictions: Reading Pandemic Politics
Authors: Dix, H.
Publication Date: 01/01/2025
Pages: 1-194
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-032-02613-2
Abstract:This is the first book-length study of Covid fictions in Britain. It argues that although it was common to see the Covid-19 pandemic as a state of exception, that is, as a unique emergency for which there was no precedent, it is misleading to treat the experience of the pandemic in Britain in isolation because the state’s political and rhetorical responses to it were less out of keeping with already existing social and political structures than might have been expected. This means that there was a strong continuity between the dominant political ideology before the outbreak of Coronavirus and that which pervaded it, an ideology that can best be described as neoliberal political and economic thought. Through its analysis of Covid fictions, the book explores ways in which writers used their work to critique the dominant ideology while also at times remaining entrapped within it precisely because it was the dominant ideology.
https://eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk/41442/
Source: Scopus
British Covid Fictions: Reading Pandemic Politics
Authors: Dix, H.
Publication Date: 01/11/2025
Publisher: Palgrave
Abstract:This book argues that despite its construction as a unique event, the Covid-19 pandemic provoked state and ideological responses that were not exceptional to the already-existing modes of social and political thought that had become predominant in Britain before it. Whilst it is undoubtedly true that the pandemic changed millions of people’s lives in many different ways, the book interrogates the assumption of a fundamental difference in the dominant ideology before and after Covid-19, identifying instead a strong degree of continuity between the pervasive structures of British society before, during and after the pandemic. In turn, those structures are marked by a neoliberal political outlook, an outlook which, the book shows, writers of Covid fiction use their work to examine and critique. However, it also shows that, precisely because they write from positions within the dominant ideology, such writers cannot entirely escape or transform it in spite of the critical perspectives they bring to bear on it. This means that their work is involved in the material reproduction of the existing social order which it nevertheless critiques, so that its critical orientation with regard to neoliberalism is one of complex ambivalence.
https://eprints.bournemouth.ac.uk/41442/
Source: Manual