Despite Britain’s long-standing reputation as a ‘reluctant European’, little research has been done on the treatment of the European Union in cultural production. This essay analyses responses to integration in British fiction of the second half of the twentieth century. Drawing on cultural materialist theory, the essay finds the same mixture of indifference and hostility that marked public discourse and argues that such responses were moulded by the Euroscepticism current amongst governmental and media elites. As illustrated by the work of Nancy Mitford, John Berger, Elizabeth Wilson, Tim Parks and others, engagement increased between the Treaty of Rome and the turn of the twenty-first century, although ideological commitment to ‘Project Europe’ remained largely absent.

中文翻译：

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不情愿的欧洲人：英国小说家与共同市场

尽管英国长期享有“不情愿的欧洲人”的名声，但关于欧盟在文化生产中的待遇的研究很少。本文分析了 20 世纪下半叶英国小说对融合的反应。这篇文章借鉴了文化唯物主义理论，发现了公共话语中同样的冷漠和敌意混合，并认为这种反应是由政府和媒体精英中流行的欧洲怀疑主义塑造的。正如南希·米特福德、约翰·伯杰、伊丽莎白·威尔逊、蒂姆·帕克斯和其他人的工作所表明的那样，罗马条约到 21 世纪之交之间的参与增加了，尽管对“欧洲计划”的意识形态承诺仍然基本不存在。