Liz Sands
Doctoral Student in Literature - Liz's thesis is entitled 'Spectres of Thatcherism: Melancholia and Spaces of Isolation in Contemporary Women’s Writing of the North'.
Research Project Title:
Spectres of Thatcherism: Melancholia and Spaces of Isolation in Contemporary Women’s Writing of the North
Supervisors:
Prof Anne Whitehead, Dr Ella Dzelzainis and Prof Clare Bambra
Contact Details:
Email: e.sands2@newcastle.ac.uk
Brief Outline of Research Project:
This project explores depression and melancholia through the spaces of contemporary novels by women. It argues that female British writers working from the 1970s to the present, specifically those writing about the North of England, articulated social and cultural shifts brought on by Margaret Thatcher’s government through images of entrapment, surveillance, displacement and haunting.
Rather than just reading these tropes as metaphorical and/or representational, my project contends that chronic depression (articulated by the DSM-IV as dysthymia) can be best understood through the affective reading of the novel subjects and their environments: family homes, shopping centres, run-down streets and rented single rooms. These cut-off spaces are products of Thatcherism, be it devastated former industrial towns, or London flats which only serve to isolate their renters through their extreme prices and dilapidation.
The project reasons that a fuller understanding of dysthymia in women must be understood through spatial theory and affect theory, while examining both the representational and the felt aspects of chronic depression and melancholia. Put simply: do spaces represent characters’ depression, or can we read the characters as being depressed because of the spaces they inhabit?