Novels of precarity: neoliberal counternarratives in contemporary British women’s fiction

Abstract

This thesis argues that there is a growing canon of contemporary women’s literature that is interested in exploring and reimaging the ‘capitalist fraying’ (*1) of conventional good-­life fantasies in contemporary Britain. By primarily using the theories of Lauren Berlant and Sara Ahmed as a framework for understanding how precarity can be considered from an affective standpoint, this thesis will study how the chosen authors present British neoliberal society as an inherently precarious environment. The thesis begins by discussing the evolution of the neologism ‘precarity’ from a term used to describe the shifting socioeconomic environment at the turn of the millennium, to one utilised across a range of disciplines to broadly describe the affective experience of living and working under neoliberal capitalism. In the first chapter, the thesis will explore how Ali Smith’s novel Hotel World presents contemporary Britain as an exclusionary environment epitomised by the non-place at the centre of its interweaving narratives: the Global Hotel. The second chapter discusses Kate Atkinson’s Started Early, Took My Dog, a novel which utilises the genre of detective fiction to explore two time frames that bookend the age of neoliberal ideology, the 1970s and the present day. The third chapter will study how Hilary Mantel’s Beyond Black utilises gothic tropes to display a fractured contemporary Britain, which teeters on the edge of social and environmental ruin. The thesis aims to demonstrate that these writers, in challenging the traditional narratives of the good life fantasy, are creating works that present a counternarrative to neoliberalism. *1 Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham & London:Duke University Press, 2011), p.295

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Identifiers

ORCID for Sheila Hanson: orcid.org/0000-0003-4641-9483

ORCID for Shelley Cobb: orcid.org/0000-0003-1153-8482

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