Love in the Time of Thatcherism

: British Neoliberalism and Contemporary Romantic Love Narratives

Abstract

The central argument of this thesis is that contemporary British authors are engaged in a literary exploration of the concept of romantic love within a historically specific framework, which involves a reformulation of its language and conventions. While redeploying conventional features of romantic plots, such as love at first sight and the romantic obstacle, Lavina Greenlaw, Hanif Kureishi, Ian McEwan and Jeanette Winterson foreground their characters’ struggles to maintain, reaffirm, and even identify romantic love. In particular, this reinvention of love is driven by the insistent preoccupation of these authors with the cultural inheritance of Thatcherism: a set of attitudes towards and assumptions about social and interpersonal relations that have become widespread since Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as British Prime Minister and that persist, despite the controversial status of Thatcher’s personal legacy, in contemporary British culture. Romantic love in British fiction is therefore grounded in a renegotiation of contemporary British history and values.

Using a multidisciplinary theoretical lens, this thesis contends that British writers’ compulsion to return to Thatcherism indicates their attempts to elucidate and overcome a crisis in contemporary modes of loving. The figure of Thatcher haunts the texts in this study, often as a shadowy force exerting an uncanny influence on characters and events. At the same time, Thatcherism is consistently presented in terms of an internalised drive, through which characters restlessly cycle through the pursuit, attainment, rejection, and loss of love. However, through their representations of the pitfalls of loving within what I call Thatcherite Love, these writers also evoke a new, literary conception of love. In this conception, since individuals repeatedly recall and reaffirm their commitment to each other, love is a continually evolving framework that is bound to narration and storytelling: a necessary and collaborative fiction.

Date of Award	17 Jun 2025
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Bristol
Supervisor	Ulrika Maude (Supervisor) & Josie Gill (Supervisor)