In the British context the phenomenon of new slaveries, with its new forms of exploitation related to globalization, began its development in the early 1990s and was first narrated through Ruth Rendell’s crime novel Simisola (1994). It then escalated to include a great range of literary and artistic works depicting a wide variety of forms of exploitation (Deandrea 2015). In this article I intend to investigate the increasingly crucial role played by genre fiction in the narration of British new slaveries in recent years. I intend to focus on how unsettling forms of enslavement and spectrality in today’s Britain are brought to light, first of all, in Rendell’s last books, such as Not in the Flesh (2007), where the main plot on long-buried corpses echoes the subplot on female genital mutilation in the British-Somali community; and The Vault (2011), where a mystery (again) on long-buried corpses hides a reality of enslaved domestic workers and sex slaves. Primary importance is given to Jonathan Coe’s Number 11 (2015), a state-of-the- nation novel constructed as a sequence of popular genres: reality show, detective fiction, satire and horror/gothic. In the plot of Number 11, the greedy madness of globalization’s neoliberal elite culminates in the building of new levels for their mansions 45 feet below ground, thus producing environmental impacts but also unleashing the revengeful horror of new slaves. Coe’s triumph of genre fiction in Number 11 is also intertextual, since he repeatedly pays homage to H.G. Wells’s science-fiction works.
"I am anger itself": British New Slavery and Genre Fiction in Jonathan Coe's "Number 11"
Deandrea, Pietro
2026-01-01
Abstract
In the British context the phenomenon of new slaveries, with its new forms of exploitation related to globalization, began its development in the early 1990s and was first narrated through Ruth Rendell’s crime novel Simisola (1994). It then escalated to include a great range of literary and artistic works depicting a wide variety of forms of exploitation (Deandrea 2015). In this article I intend to investigate the increasingly crucial role played by genre fiction in the narration of British new slaveries in recent years. I intend to focus on how unsettling forms of enslavement and spectrality in today’s Britain are brought to light, first of all, in Rendell’s last books, such as Not in the Flesh (2007), where the main plot on long-buried corpses echoes the subplot on female genital mutilation in the British-Somali community; and The Vault (2011), where a mystery (again) on long-buried corpses hides a reality of enslaved domestic workers and sex slaves. Primary importance is given to Jonathan Coe’s Number 11 (2015), a state-of-the- nation novel constructed as a sequence of popular genres: reality show, detective fiction, satire and horror/gothic. In the plot of Number 11, the greedy madness of globalization’s neoliberal elite culminates in the building of new levels for their mansions 45 feet below ground, thus producing environmental impacts but also unleashing the revengeful horror of new slaves. Coe’s triumph of genre fiction in Number 11 is also intertextual, since he repeatedly pays homage to H.G. Wells’s science-fiction works.
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