[ecrea] Edited collection - Hard Times: Austerity and Popular Culture

Hard Times: Austerity and Popular Culture



Edited by Helen Davies and Claire O’Callaghan





“I said pretend you've got no money, she just laughed and said oh you're 
so funny. I said yeah? Well I can't see anyone else smiling in here.” 
(“Common People”, Pulp)

“I decree today that life
Is simply taking and not giving
England is mine - it owes me a living” (“Still Ill”, The Smiths)



“Folks don't laugh so loud when you've a grand in your back pocket.” 
(The Full Monty)



Although the British Prime Minister David Cameron popularised the 
renowned axiom ‘the age of austerity’ in a speech of 2009, political 
discourse has long given shape to popular rhetoric on the subject. The 
sentiments of ‘make do and mend’ and ‘boom and bust’ offers two such 
examples that have filtered into popular and national conscious. Indeed, 
there have been memorable occasions when political parties have sought 
to appropriate the vehicle of popular culture to articulate their 
agendas; who can forget Tony Blair’s use of the D:Ream dance anthem 
‘Things Can Only Get Better’ as part of the Labour Party’s Manifesto in 
the 1996 General Election, for example?



However, political idiom is not the sole medium to express the effects 
of austerity, recession and the global economic crisis in contemporary 
society. From Jarvis Cocker’s glamorisation of the sexual tension 
between the ‘haves’ and have nots’ in Pulp’s ‘Common People’, to 
Morrissey’s cynical yet  dulcet tones espousing what today’s  Government 
might  describe as the scourge of benefit culture in The Smith’s ‘Still 
Ill’, popular culture has sought continually  to explore and engage with 
the social and cultural manifestations of recession and austerity. John 
Self, the protagonist of Martin Amis’s Money learned hard lessons about 
‘maxed out’ credit cards in the Thatcherite Yuppie culture of the 1980s, 
but the summer of 2013 will see Kirstie Allsopp share her 
austerity-inspired know-how with prime-time audiences in the Channel 4 
television series Fill Your House For Free.



Our edited book collection, Hard Times: Austerity and Popular Culture 
seeks to map the diverse ways in which austerity is—and has 
been—reflected in and by popular culture. We solicit submissions on any 
aspect of austerity in popular culture that can offer new and innovative 
insights into its representation and ideologies.



In what ways have literature, film and television, and music (amongst 
other cultural modes) given expression to austerity? How are its effects 
conveyed? What commentaries does popular culture offer on, about or 
towards the age of austerity? How has the expression of austerity in 
popular culture changed over time, and what lessons about 
representations of austerity in popular culture from the past can be 
learnt in the present? Can popular culture have a significant influence 
in shifting our attitudes towards political discourses of austerity?



In soliciting submissions from across the arts and humanities, the 
editors welcome submissions that could consider the following themes:



·         Representing recession

·         Credit and spending culture

·         Boom and bust – individual and cultural

·         The Gendering of austerity

·         Thrift chic

·         Self-sufficiency vs. spending cuts

·         The austere family

·         Race, disability, and/or class and austerity

·         Benefits culture(s)

·         Nostalgia and austerity

·         Representing contemporary austerity through the past

·         Unemployment and/or poverty

·         Youth and austerity

·         Revolution, revolt and protest against austere times





Please submit abstracts of 600 words and a short biographical note to 
both editors, Dr Helen Davies ((Helen.Davies /at/ tees.ac.uk)) and Dr Claire 
O’Callaghan ((cfo3 /at/ le.ac.uk)) by 31st January 2014. If accepted, completed 
chapters of 6000 words will be expected by 1st September 2014. A 
proposal will be submitted to I.B. Tauris from whom we have a received 
an expression of interest.



Dr Helen Davies,

Programme Leader, Senior Lecturer in English Studies

School of Arts and Media,

Teesside University,

Middlesbrough

TS1 3BA



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