The Contemporary Uncanny After Brexit: Literary Disruptions of the Self

This chapter seeks to illuminate the topicality of Freud’s concept of the uncanny and its conceptual modifications in contemporary critical discourse as well as in recent literary works. For this reason, essential points of ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) are juxtaposed with related discussions about Freud’s theory from the twenty-first century regarding ‘strangerness’ (Levine 2020), the uncanny and contemporary culture (Masschelein 2011) and sociological hauntology (Gordon, 2008). Based on this, two novels that belong to the rising genre of ‘Brexlit’ (Shaw 2021) will be analysed: M. John Harrison’s The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (2020) and Niall Griffiths’ Broken Ghost (2019). Both novels depict fragmented experiences of reality, unstable identities or a haunting (national) past, which attest to the social and individual uncertainties in a post-Brexit country and ultimately represent aspects of the contemporary uncanny.