Welcome to Retrotopia?

In the long twentieth century, negotiations of collective identities were characterised by an orientation towards the past rather than towards the future. For this phenomenon, Zygmunt Bauman has introduced the term »retrotopia«. Additionally, in the British context, retrotopian narratives often contained what has been termed »declinist« elements. Apart from temporal associations, the term »retrotopia« also points to the spatiality of cultural narratives. Covering a timespan from the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, the articles in this volume concentrate on retrotopian elements of Britishness as expressed in fiction, art and music. They further discuss the question of how these visions were emplaced. The volume is the result of a workshop conducted during the summer term 2024 with students of the MA programme European Studies at the Catholic University of Eichstätt-Ingolstadt. It contains articles written by scholars at different stages in their careers and from different disciplines such as literary studies, history, cultural studies and art history.