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Spirits of enterprise: the disappearing child in Thatcherism and theory

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posted on 2023-06-21, 06:02 authored by Dominic DeanDominic Dean
Thatcherism offered a promise of future prosperity based on unleashing the young male’s ambition; simultaneously, its ‘Victorian values’ sought to retrieve a moral past. Literary depictions of Thatcherism make the child central to a resulting contradiction between imagined moral past and materialistic future. The disappearance of the child recurs in Peter Ackroyd’s Hawksmoor (1985), Ian McEwan’s The Child in Time (1987), and Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty (2004). These novels satirise how Thatcherism managed the contradictions in its vision of the future by attempting to regulate the child’s ambitions. They even use the abducted, killed, or simply disappeared child to audaciously parody both the results of Thatcherite policy and contemporaneous practices of literary and psychoanalytic Theory, as each struggles to represent the child’s interests in the future. Here Thatcherite materialism leads, unintentionally and ironically, to unacceptable material ambitions in the child.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Journal

Literature & History

ISSN

0306-1973

Publisher

SAGE Publications

Issue

2

Volume

26

Page range

231-250

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2017-07-28

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2017-07-28

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2017-07-28

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