Dealing with Deprivation: Figurations of Poverty on the Contemporary British Book Market

Abstract

There have been demands in recent years that literature and its analysis should play a more significant role than to date in the emerging transdisciplinary field of Poverty Studies. Poverty re-emerged as a theme on the British book market in the course of the 1990s. This reappearance, especially in the form of fictional and factual narratives, concurred with increased societal attention to issues of extensive social inequality and class polarisation, economic deprivation, homelessness and precarious work. The essay proposes an approach that tries to do justice to the textual and extra-textual factors that configure the image of poverty in the literary field. It then discusses a selection of poverty narratives from three sectors of the contemporary UK book market: the autobiographical ‘misery memoir’ (Peter Roche, Unloved), ‘popular’ fiction (by Ian Rankin and Neil Gaiman) and ‘literary’ fiction (Jon McGregor, Even the Dogs). 1. THE NEW PRESENCE OF POVERTY IN LITERATURE AND LITERARY STUDIES Poverty, “the lack of basic capabilities to live in dignity”, re-emerged as a theme on the British book market in the course of the 1990s. This reappearance, especially in the form of fictional and (allegedly) factual narratives, concurred with increased societal attention in post-Thatcherite DOI 10.1515/ang-2012-0001 1 United Nations, Substantive Issues Arising in the Implementation of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights: Poverty. E/C.12/2001/ 10 (Geneva and New York: United Nations, 2001) §7. This definition is followed by a more extensive one: “a human condition characterized by sustained or chronic deprivation of the resources, capabilities, choices, security and power necessary for the enjoyment of an adequate standard of living and other civil, cultural, economic, political and social rights” (§8). This reflects the current use in the social and economic sciences, which understand poverty as a relative and multi-dimensional phenomenon. 2 For Krishan Kumar, the early 1960s saw “the last attempt to date to portray ‘the poor’ in literature in anything like a systematic fashion”, and he speculated, in the early 1990s, that “literature may no longer be the best way to represent [the poor]”. Cf. his “Versions of the Pastoral: Poverty and the Poor in English Fiction from the 1840s to the 1950s”, Journal of Historical Sociology 8 (1995): 1–35, at 28f. This statement is contradicted, however, by the recent revival of the theme in