British cultural production has a long history of foreclosure. Understood as a premature abandonment, or an abortive failure, of radical political projects, foreclosure has an imaginative and material register in working-class writing, which has been read since the 1930s as failing to experiment, relying on realism without meaningful engagement with questions of literary form. This view has been challenged by literary scholars, who have demonstrated that formal experimentation did exist, though not in ways that comfortably align with the usual reading of middle-class modernism (Clarke Working Class Writing, 2018). Raymond Williams’ novel Border Country (1960) narrates the experience of the 1926 General Strike’s failure as ‘a slow cancellation of the future’ – a phrase which is usually associated with Mark Fisher’s theory of capitalist realism from the late 2000s. This pattern was repeated decades later with the 1984-5 Miners’ Strikes. In England, the collapse of union power marked the end of the cultural rebellion typified by the Angry Young Men Movement, with representations of the Strikes not fully emerging until after 2000. The retrospective historicisation of Thatcherism did not represent a return to working-class realism, however. Exemplified by David Peace’s GB84 (2004), this moment was marked by narrative fragmentation and formal experimentation, signifying both the ‘end of history’ and a dominating, ultra-centralist Britishness. The success of the British state in suppressing working-class movements is therefore registered culturally, emerging as a formal mode in which imagining successful alternatives is always already impossible.
The intertwining of Britain’s literary and political (sub)cultures was registered materially during the devolution period. In post-devolutionary Scotland, a national debt to literature culminated in the engraving into the stone of the new parliament building at Holyrood Alastair Gray’s appeal to ‘work as if you live in the early days of a new nation’, which had appeared in his novel Lanark twenty-three years earlier. This line, making its way into the very material existence of devolution, suggests a kind of optimism that saw the decentralisation of state authority as tied to the decentralisation of cultural production. The devolutionary moment was also a time of significant change for the material production of working-class literature. Under New Labour’s ‘Creative Britain’ policy, new and emerging writers were published in alignment with state-national priorities, even as economic responsibility was transferred to local Arts Council offices (Rogers State Sponsored Literature, 2020). State control of devolved institutions has continued well into the twenty-first century, where ‘place-based’ cultural regeneration has served as a distraction from Britain’s legacy of abandoned infrastructure projects (Davies The Broken Promise of Infrastructure, 2023).
This special issue seeks to theorise foreclosure in relation to British cultural production since 1960. In addition to literary imagination, we are also interested in questions of genre and form, interpretive practices, and the material conditions of cultural production. To what extent is Britain’s post-war and contemporary imaginary characterised by partially realised or prematurely abandoned political projects? How has an emphasis on realism sidelined formal experimentation as a class-conscious literary strategy? And what are the implications of the state’s increasing ‘sponsorship’ of literature as a social enterprise?
We are looking for essays of 8,000 words from scholars working within literary studies (broadly defined). Interdisciplinary approaches are especially welcome. Topics may include, but are not limited to:
- Foreclosure and literary experimentation
- Anti-capitalism and/or radical pessimism
- Post-British literary speculation
- Paradigms of working-class resistance and/or collective action
- Temporality and democracy (e.g. from the ‘slow cancellation of the future’ to the ‘end of history’)
- Foreclosure as literary formal and/or aesthetic sensibility
- Democracy and ecology (e.g. bio-regionalism)
- Foreclosure as a material condition of British culture
Guest editor information
Guest editors: Chloe Ashbridge (Newcastle) and Owain Burrell (Warwick)
Email: Chloe.Ashbridge@ncl.ac.uk and O.Burrell@warwick.ac.uk
Submission and deadlines
Please send abstracts of 300 words and a biographical note of 100 words to both editors by Friday 18th July 2025.
We will let potential contributors know whether we wish to proceed with their essay by 31st July 2025, and submissions of full drafts will then be due by 28th February 2026. Peer review will take place between March – June 2026, with revised, final articles due by 1st August. Publication is planned for October / November 2026.
