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Kim Duff. Contemporary British Literature and Urban Space: After Thatcher. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Pp. 208. $90.00 (cloth).
Edward Soja's notion of the “spatial turn” has, understandably, been interpreted in a multitude of ways across the humanities. In Contemporary British Literature and Urban Space: After Thatcher, Kim Duff employs the term to analyze both Thatcherite policies of social reform and the “affective geographies” of British city space in late-twentieth and early twenty-first fiction. Drawing on a diverse assemblage of contemporary authors ranging from J. G. Ballard to Alan Hollinghurst, Duff asserts that authors are using urban spatial theory to deconstruct cultural identities under and after Thatcher.
The book is organized into four chapters, each examining a related facet of the dialectics of urban space. The first chapter engages in a broad discussion of English heritage and nostalgia in Julian Barnes' England, England (1998) and Iain Sinclair's Lights Out for the Territory (1997). Echoing Thatcherite privatization of territory and services, Duff suggests that the two texts envision a marketization of British history in which spaces and identities are manufactured for profit. Her reading of England, England critically interrogates Barnes' dystopic vision of a commercialized theme park to offer an analogy of how history is rewritten in the novel to disregard the spatialities and identities of localized place. However, the texts are suggested to also provide a counter to Thatcherite intervention, generating a sense of nostalgia for both historical pasts...