Everything changes, and everything stays the same: nostalgia, memory, and British identity in Jonathan Coe’s Birmingham novels

UNIVERSITÀ DEGLI STUDI DI

BERGAMO

Dipartimento di Lingue, Letterature e Culture Straniere

Corso di Laurea Magistrale in Intercultural Studies in Languages

and Literatures

Classe n. LM-37 - Modern American and European Languages and

Literatures

EVERYTHING CHANGES, AND

EVERYTHING STAYS THE SAME: NOSTALGIA,

MEMORY, AND BRITISH IDENTITY IN

JONATHAN COE’S BIRMINGHAM NOVELS

Relatore:

Chiar.mo Prof. Fabio Cleto

Correlatore:

Chiar.mo Prof. Michele Sala Tesi di Laurea Magistrale

Maria BUZZETTI

Matricola n. 1006115

ANNO ACCADEMICO 2025 / 2026

Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................. 1

1. THE SHAPE OF LONGING: READING NOSTALGIA IN LITERATURE,

HISTORY, AND POLITICS .............................................................................. 5

M : ........................................................... 5

1.1. APPING NOSTALGIA DISCIPLINARY FRAMEWORKS

1.1.1. Beyond sentimentality: a multifaceted phenomenon ............................................. 6

1.1.2. A medical affliction or a psychological resource? .................................................. 6

1.1.3. The sociological turn: nostalgia as shared experience ........................................ 10

1.1.4. Timeless longing and the nostalgia of modernity .................................................12

N ...........................................................................................

13

1.2. OSTALGIA FORGES HISTORY

1.2.1. What nostalgia tells us: selective memory and the uses of the past ..................... 13

1.2.2. Nostalgia as an ideological instrument ................................................................ 15

1.2.3. The nostalgic nation: Hannah Rose Woods and the politics of British memory .16

N ..................................................................................... 17

1.3. OSTALGIA AS A LITERARY MODE

1.3.1. A mixture of mockery and sympathy: Jonathan Coe and the nostalgic novel ... 18

1.3.2. Nostalgia as social critique: Coe’s diagnostic fiction .......................................... 20

P : ...............................21

1.4. ARALLEL TRACKS LITERATURE AND HISTORIOGRAPHY IN DIALOGUE

THE ROTTERS’ CLUB

2. THE PAST THAT WON’T LET GO: NOSTALGIA IN &

THE CLOSED CIRCLE .................................................................................. 23

T : .. 23

2.1. HE SEVENTIES AND AFTER HISTORICAL CONTEXTS AND THEIR CONTESTED MEMORIES

2.1.1. From consensus to neoliberalism: Britain’s political transformation from the

1970s to the 2000s ................................................................................................ 24

2.1.2. Nostalgia in and for the seventies: Woods’s analysis .......................................... 26

T R ’ C T C C

2.2. M : .............. 31

HE OTTERS LUB HE LOSED IRCLE

IRROR IMAGES INTRODUCING AND

2.2.1. A Birmingham microcosm: characters, interlacing stories and social types in

the diptych ............................................................................................................. 33

2.2.2. Between Birmingham and London: identity and the provincial imagination .. 35

P , : T ............ 37

2.3. RIVATE FEELING PUBLIC HISTORY NOSTALGIA IN THE LIVES OF THE ROTTERS

2.3.1. Jonathan Coe, a confessed nostalgic .................................................................... 37

2.3.2. Micro and macro: the interplay of private and collective nostalgias ................ 38

2.3.3. From innocence to disillusionment: Britain’s political Bildung .......................... 51

2.3.4. Powellite nostalgia and racial politics in The Rotters’ Club ............................... 53

P W C B ’ ............................. 56

2.4. ARALLEL DIAGNOSES OF OODS AND OE ON RITAIN S NOSTALGIA

MIDDLE ENGLAND

3. A LAND THAT NEVER QUITE EXISTED: AND THE

POLITICS OF COMPETING NOSTALGIAS .................................................... 58

A ....................................................................................... 58

3.1. DECADE OF NOSTALGIA WARS

3.1.1. Social and political fracture: the 2010s from the riots to the referendum .......... 58

3.1.2. A decade ruled by nostalgia: Woods on culture wars, Brexit, and the

weaponisation of the past ..................................................................................... 62

M E

A B : .................................... 68

3.2. IDDLE NGLAND

REXIT NOVEL IN DISGUISE INTRODUCING

3.2.1. Revisiting the Trotter siblings through Brexlit .................................................... 69

3.2.2. Merrie, Deep, and Old: the structure of Middle England as argumentative form

................................................................................................................................ 71

T E , , 74

3.3. HE MANY FACES OF NGLISH LONGING ACROSS GENERATIONS POLITICS AND IDENTITY

3.3.1. Still looking back: Benjamin’s quest for peace ..................................................... 75

3.3.2. Generational perspectives and divides ................................................................ 81

3.3.3. The illusion of harmony: watching the 2012 London Olympics ......................... 83

3.3.4. Identity, myth, and ‘Middle Englishness’ ............................................................ 87

3.3.5. The fracture lines: Brexit, competing nostalgias, and the end of ‘Middle

England’ .................................................................................................................91

3.3.6. Learning to let go: future-oriented nostalgia and the Bildung of a nation ........ 94

C W B ’ .......... 95

3.4. OE AND OODS EXPOSING THE MYTH BEHIND RITAIN S NOSTALGIC CONDITION

4. BLITZ NOSTALGIA, FAMILY GRIEF, AND WISE NOSTALGIA IN

BOURNVILLE

BITTERSWEET ..................................................................... 97

S : ’ ................... 98

4.1. EVEN OCCASIONS AND SEVEN DECADES A COUNTRY S HISTORY IN A FAMILY

B V : ................................... 102

4.2. OURNVILLE ILLAGE MANUFACTURING A PASTORAL PARADISE

F : B E .............. 104

4.3. IGHTING THE WAR AGAIN LITZ NOSTALGIA AND THE UROPEAN QUESTION

4.3.1. Blitz nostalgia across the decades of the twentieth century .............................. 104

4.3.2. The taste of identity: the chocolate wars with Europe ...................................... 106

4.3.3. Blitz nostalgia in the pandemic performance ................................................... 108

M ’ : ..................................................... 109

4.4. ARY S SOLITUDE PERSONAL AND NATIONAL GRIEF

D ? T ’ .... 110

4.5. EBUNKING NOSTALGIA OR REDEEMING IT HE NOVEL S AMBIVALENT CONCLUSION

REFERENCES ................................................................................................. 113

Introduction

Past, present and future: that was what she heard, in the sound of the children’s

voices from the playground at midmorning break. Like a murmurous river, like the

incoming wash of the tide, a distant counterpoint to the swish, swish, swish of her broom on

the step, a disembodied voice whispering in her ear, over and over, the mantra:

Everything changes, and everything stays the same.

(Bournville, p. 26; p. 351)

Bournville

The epigraph above, drawn from Jonathan Coe’s (2022),

encapsulates the central paradox this thesis seeks to examine. The rhythmic

counterpoint between change and continuity shows that nostalgia is neither purely

backward-looking nor simply a refusal of the present, but rather a way of inhabiting

time that holds the past and future in suspension. It is this suspension that Coe’s fiction

repeatedly returns to, and that this study aims to analyse.

I investigate how nostalgia functions as a private emotion, a collective myth, and

The Rotters’ Club

a political instrument in Jonathan Coe’s four Birmingham novels —

The Closed Circle Middle England Bournville

(2001), (2004), (2018), and (2022).

Taken together, these novels span almost eighty years of British life — from the end of

the Second World War to the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic — and constitute a

literary reckoning with what it has meant to be British in the second half of the

twentieth century and the opening decades of the twenty-first. Coe is widely regarded

as a leading authority on the British state-of-the-nation novel, a form that weaves the

intimate texture of private lives into the broader fabric of historical and political

change. His Birmingham novels are at once family sagas and social analyses, elegies

for lost communities and satirical portrayals of the ideologies that replaced them.

Nostalgia is not merely a theme in these novels; it is the lens through which their

characters perceive and interpret the world around them, and through which Coe

himself engages with the trajectories of British society since the 1970s. From Benjamin

Trotter’s paralysing attachment to single moments of his adolescence to the Leave

campaign’s appeal to defend sovereignty under threat, the novels trace nostalgia in its

1

many forms: restorative and reflective, innocent and weaponised, elevating and

dangerous. To map these forms with the precision they demand, this thesis does not

rely solely on literary analysis. Rule, Nostalgia

Hannah Rose Woods’s (2022), provides the historical and

theoretical framework for reading Coe’s literary representations. As a cultural

historian, Woods argues that British public life has been shaped over centuries by a

recurring pattern in which nostalgia is strategically deployed to legitimise political

projects and resist uncomfortable historical reckonings. Her analysis shows that the

selective and distorted use of the past is not a recent pathology but a structural feature

of British political culture. The resonances between her historiographical account and

Coe’s fictional dramatisations are numerous and illuminating: both writers examine

the mechanisms by which collective memory is constructed, contested, and exploited;

both resist the temptation to dismiss nostalgic feelings as mere sentimentality,

insisting instead on their genuine political consequences.

In the present study, literature and historiography, read together, illuminate the

mechanisms of nostalgic consciousness more fully than either discipline can alone.

Woods provides the analytical vocabulary and historical context; Coe provides the

human texture through the emotional lives of individuals as they navigate, often

without full awareness, the ideological currents Woods describes. While she exposes

the rhetorical strategies of politicians and commentators, Coe shows how those

strategies are felt, internalised, and embraced or resisted by ordinary people over a

lifetime.

The first chapter maps the theoretical terrain underpinning the following

analysis. It opens with a survey of how nostalgia has been understood across disciplines

— from its origins as a medical diagnosis in the seventeenth century to its

reconceptualisation as a sociological and cultural phenomenon in the late twentieth

century — tracing the shift from a purely pathological model to one that acknowledges

nostalgia’s ambivalence: its capacity to be at once a resource for individual well-being

and a vehicle for collective self-deception. The chapter then examines nostalgia’s

relationship to memory, selective historical reconstruction, and the formation of

national identity, drawing on the work of scholars such as Svetlana Boym and Fred

Davis, and presenting Woods’s historiographical research on British nostalgia. It goes

on to consider nostalgia as a literary mode, with particular attention to its role in

2

postmodern fiction, positioning Coe within that tradition and examining the influence

of nostalgia in his narrative practice. The chapter closes with an account of the

interdisciplinary methodology adopted throughout the thesis, establishing the grounds

for reading the two authors together. The Rotters’ Club The Closed Circle

The second chapter analyses and as a

diptych — two novels that Coe himself has described as mirror images of one another

— and examines how private nostalgias intersect with contested collective memories of

the 1970s. At the centre of this analysis is Benjamin Trotter, whose decades-long

attachment to his younger self exemplifies, on a small scale, what Boym calls

restorative nostalgia: a futile, compulsive attempt to recover a mythologised past.

Around him, other characters embody contrasting relationships to memory and loss:

Doug’s disillusionment with the Left, Claire’s grief for her vanished sister, and Sean

Harding’s slide from schoolboy provocation into far-right nationalism. These private

trajectories are read alongside Woods’s account of how both Thatcherism and New

Labour weaponised competing narratives of the seventies — as a catastrophe on the

one hand, as a lost era of equality on the other — showing how the political uses of

historical memory, as described by Woods, find their human equivalent in Coe’s

characters and their contradictory relationships to the past.

Middle England

The third chapter turns to and the Brexit decade, a period that

both Coe and Woods identify as the culmination of a long history of nostalgic political

deployment in Britain. The novel dramatises the collision of incompatible nostalgias

brought to the fore by the 2016 referendum, revealing fractures that had been

accumulating for decades. Through the conflicting responses of Benjamin, Sophie, Ian,

Doug and others to the events of the 2010s — the austerity years, the London Olympics,

the Brexit campaign, and the referendum result — Coe maps the emotional geography

of a country that no longer shares a common past. Woods’s analysis of the Leave

campaign’s deliberate vagueness, its exploitation of resistance to change, and its

Powellite echoes enables the chapter to show how the rhetorical strategies Woods

documents are dramatised, experienced, and contested in individual lives.

Bournville,

The final chapter examines structured around seven national

occasions spanning from VE Day in 1945 to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Through

the figure of Mary — a woman inherently resistant to nostalgic romanticising — Coe

undertakes a sustained deconstruction of the stories Britain tells itself: about the Blitz,

3

the Coronation, the 1966 World Cup, the royal weddings, and the pandemic. Yet the

Bournville

chapter argues that is not only a satirical dismantling of English self-

delusion. Alongside its critique of Blitz nostalgia, the chapter traces an elegiac

attachment to Mary herself — to a presence the novel mourns as genuinely worth

Bournville

preserving. The chapter argues that reaches beyond Boym’s binary vision

of restorative and reflective nostalgia, towards what I describe as a ‘wise nostalgia’: one

that mourns honestly without falsifying the past, embodied in Mary, in the village of

Bournville itself, and in Coe’s own relationship to the Birmingham of his childhood.

Across all four chapters, the analysis sustains the dual focus that defines the

thesis’s approach: close attention to Coe’s narrative techniques, characterisation, and

formal choices on the one hand; contextualisation within the frameworks provided by

Woods and the broader scholarly literature on the other. Each chapter ends with a

comparative section that identifies points of convergence and divergence between

Coe’s literary representations and Woods’s historiographical analysis, tracing how

fiction and history can enrich — and complicate — each other’s approaches to cultural

memory and nostalgic consciousness. This study neither judges nostalgia as inherently

harmful nor celebrates it as an unambiguous good, but seeks to understand the

conditions under which it becomes one or the other — and the difference, which both

Coe and Woods insist upon, between remembering honestly and being held hostage by

an imagined past.

4

1. THE SHAPE OF LONGING: READING

NOSTALGIA IN LITERATURE, HISTORY,

AND POLITICS

1.1. Mapping nostalgia: disciplinary frameworks

The phenomenon of nostalgia is now a widely studied and discussed subject in

its various forms. It intersects with and has been approached by multiple disciplines,

from psychology to literature.

This chapter aims to define the boundaries of the concept of nostalgia as

understood in this thesis, offering a brief overview of how different disciplines have

approached its definition and study, and exploring its relationship with memory,

narrative, and national history. I identify here the key concepts that will help establish

a connection between how English novelist Jonathan Coe depicts various instances of

nostalgia through his narrative and the analysis provided by historian Hannah Rose

Rule, Nostalgia

Woods, a fellow citizen of Coe’s, in her book (2022). The focus will be

specifically on the depictions of British — and especially English — nostalgia from the

second half of the twentieth to the early twenty-first century. As we will see, nostalgia

significantly shapes identity and the way memory operates; when this influence

extends to a community or even an entire nation, this sentiment becomes a powerful

force behind political claims and actions.

In his Birmingham novels, Jonathan Coe depicts nostalgia not only as a personal

feeling but also as an ideological and political tool that can lead to the creation of

historical myths, polarisation, and the revelation of a country’s struggles to assert its

identity. To place the narrated events within their historical context and understand

how Coe’s characters navigate collective and individual memories of Britain’s recent

past, I will include Woods’s critical insights into how nostalgia influences our

memories and, at times, our recreation of the past, emphasising her deconstruction of

5

historical myths. After presenting the two authors, I will outline the interdisciplinary

approach and describe the methodology used in my analysis.

1.1.1. Beyond s