This paper takes Anthony Cartwright’s The Cut (2017) as its central focus, a novel commissioned by European publisher Peirene Press as a fictional response to the UK’s 2016 Brexit vote. I provide a discussion of what I term the ‘cultural politics of devolution’ in Cartwright’s text, suggesting that it offers a critique of the British centralised state form and makes demands for the decentralisation of political power. Focussed on a small deindustrialised town, The Cut is an English regional polemic exploring how uneven development played a decisive role in the outcome of the European Union referendum. Building on Doreen Massey’s insight that places are not simply physical locations but ‘articulations of social relations’ (Massey, 1994: 22), my discussion of Cartwright’s novel is concerned with the way a discursive, cultural version of ‘the North’ was mobilised ideologically as a fulcrum of the Leave vote within Brexit media and political discourse. I trace the ways in which The Cut responds to this manoeuvre in an ambivalent deployment of nostalgia as both a vehicle for regional devolution and a literary mode associated with a parochial version of ‘the North’ that continues to exist in the national imagination. As this paper demonstrates, the text equivocates between a radical nostalgia that highlights the need for constitutional reform and a reactionary turn to the industrial past. Ultimately, I propose that The Cut forecloses its own devolutionary potential in an aesthetic and thematic reliance on cultural stereotypes of Northernness, suggesting the limitations of nostalgia as a resource for constructing alternatives to the present.

中文翻译：

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``就像伦敦一样，你知道''：英国脱欧小说和权力下放的文化政治

本文以安东尼·卡特赖特（Anthony Cartwright）的作品《 The Cut》（2017）为重点，该小说由欧洲出版商Peirene Press委托撰写，是对英国2016年脱欧公投的虚构回应。我在卡特赖特的著作中讨论了我所说的“权力下放的文化政治”，这表明它对英国的中央集权国家形态提出了批评，并要求对政治权力进行权力下放。The Cut聚焦于一个去工业化的小城镇，是英国的一个区域性辩论，探讨不均衡的发展如何在欧盟公投的结果中起决定性作用。基于多琳·梅西（Doreen Massey）的见解，即地点不仅仅是物理位置，而是“对社会关系的表达”（Massey，1994：22），我对卡特赖特小说的论述涉及一种话语，意识形态动员了“北方”的文化版本，作为英国退欧媒体和政治言论中休假投票的支点。我追踪了The Cut如何以一种怀旧的矛盾情绪来应对这一策略，既是地区转移的工具，又是一种与狭imagination的“北方”版本相关的文学模式，这种模式在全国范围内仍然存在。正如本文所证明的，该文本在强调宪法改革必要性的激进怀旧和对工业历史的反动转向之间进行了模棱两可。最终，我建议《割礼》在审美和主题上依赖于北方性的文化刻板印象，从而丧失其自身的发展潜力，这暗示了怀旧的局限性，因为它是建构当下替代品的一种资源。