Thatcher & After: Margaret Thatcher and Her Afterlife in Contemporary Culture

Thatcher & After explores the persistent reappearances of Margaret Thatcher, Britain's most loved and reviled prime minister, in contemporary British culture. Britain is still struggling to come to terms with Thatcher's legacy twenty years after she left office. This exciting and original volume reads Thatcher's moment as a profound and powerful rupture in British political and cultural life and argues that there is an afterlife to Thatcher and Thatcherism that requires address and even redress in the present. The urgent goal of this volume is to restore a Thatcherite past to a present that is increasingly forgetful and celebratory of Thatcher and to resist the growing conservatism in British life. Its contributors provide strategies and opportunities to resist in the present, however belatedly, Thatcherism's all-pervasive policies – policies that can be seen problematically even at the core of New Labour's ideologies. Through a range of topics, scholars of literature, cultural studies, media studies, film and drama question what it means to be living in a post-Thatcher world.

Louisa Hadley has worked at the University of Edinburgh, UK, Grant MacEwan College and Concordia, University College of Alberta, Canada, where she taught a range of literature courses. She is the author of The Fiction of A. S. Byatt (2008) in Palgrave Macmillan's Reader's Guide to Essential Criticism series and a monograph titled Neo-Victorian Fiction and Historical Narrative: The Victorians and Us forthcoming from Palgrave Macmillan (2010).

Elizabeth Ho is Assistant Professor of English at Ursinus College, USA, where she teaches courses in contemporary British and postcolonial literatures. She has contributed journal articles to Cultural Critique, Antipodes: A North American Journal for Australian Literature and College Literature.