British Covid Fictions: Reading Pandemic Politics.

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.