Introduction: What We Need Now ... ' -- Part I: Identifying the Cultural Politics of Disenfranchisement -- Resistance and Rationalization: Exile and the Inner Cities in Jeanette Winterson's The Passion -- Rave To The Grave: Hanif Kureishi And The Failure Of Left Culturalism -- Politics Is Over: Flexibility and Freedom in J.G. Ballard's Late Dystopias -- Part II: Locating Urban Culture in Twenty-First-Century British Fiction -- The New Culture Wars: Neo/Liberal Pedagogy in Ian McEwan's Saturday Ad Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go -- Placing Politics: Home and the Right to Habitation in Monica Ali's Brick Lane and Zadie Smith's NW -- Coda: The Postcultural City and the Postculturalist Left.
Summary:
"During the 1980s, urban space became an important battleground in a confrontation between left and right over the meaning of freedom. While Thatcherism sought to harness the power of the free market to rationalise and reform the inner cities, the response of the 'cultural' left was to celebrate the emancipatory potential of flexible identities and expressive practices associated with urban subcultures. However, through close readings of eight contemporary authors, this book argues that a problematic consequence of the left's experiment with freedom was to elevate exclusion to the status of a political principle and to close down the space of politics itself. It explores how, in less than two decades, the coexistence of flexible cultural identities and urban space has become a virtual impossibility in British fiction. And it suggests that, today, the British novel is frequently marked by structures of failed utopianism, frustrated or incomplete experiments and even withdrawal and quietism, all of which are a consequence of the left's celebration of a cultural politics of disenfranchisement"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.