Abstract
Reading Jenny Turner’s The Brainstorm (2007) as a rewriting of women’s popular fiction, this chapter shows how Turner’s novel interrogates New Labour’s accommodation of neoliberal rationalisation within its commitment to the British Welfare State. It argues that Turner’s novel stages a philosophical engagement with Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, with autonomist Marxism’s notion of social reproduction and the refusal of work, and the Utopian collectivism of post-war Brtiain to challenge the idea of neoliberal competition in the contemporary workplace. With a particular concentration on gender and class inequality, Turner sketches out the opportunities for political solidarity with those marginalised communities that sit at the edges of the New Economy.
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Connell, L. (2017). Working Women and the Welfare State: Jenny Turner’s The Brainstorm . In: Precarious Labour and the Contemporary Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-63928-4_5
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