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Title: | A British national scandal: hunger, foodbanks, and the deployment of a Dickensian trope |
Authors: | Howarth, A |
Keywords: | hunger;foodbanks;welfare state;social imaginaries |
Issue Date: | 20-Oct-2020 |
Publisher: | Routledge (Taylor and Francis Group) |
Citation: | Howarth, A. (2022) 'A British national scandal: hunger, foodbanks, and the deployment of a Dickensian trope', Journal of Contemporary European Studies, 30 (1), pp. 136 - 150. doi: 10.1080/14782804.2020.1839395. |
Abstract: | The normalization of foodbanks in Britain has sharply polarized public debates around issues of hunger. Government supporters laud their presence as a timely revival of an earlier tradition of voluntarism able to offset an unaffordable welfare state or stigmatize foodbanks as new spaces of ‘dependency’. Government critics view foodbanks as a consequence of ministerial indifference to growing hunger and a betrayal of the core values envisaged by the founders of the welfare state. The very presence of foodbanks in one of the richest countries in the world is denounced as a national scandal that violates an intrinsic quality of Britishness and signifies a regression to an earlier, more heartless era. In mooting this argument, critics have deployed a Victorian trope that evokes familiar figures and narratives from popular culture in a circular social imaginary of ‘what we were’ in the Victorian era as distinct from ‘what we have been’ in the post-war welfare state to ‘what we are reverting to’ now. The paper critically deconstructs the trope as a device to hold the government to account while also critiquing its nostalgia rooted in a mythic notion of the welfare state which was never as inclusive as popular imagining would believe. |
Description: | This article is part of a special issue: Counter-Narratives of Europe: edited by Richard McMahon and Wolfram Kaiser. |
URI: | https://bura.brunel.ac.uk/handle/2438/21688 |
DOI: | https://doi.org/10.1080/14782804.2020.1839395 |
ISSN: | 1478-2804 |
Appears in Collections: | Brunel Law School Research Papers |
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FullText.pdf | Copyright © 2020 Taylor & Francis. This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of Contemporary European Studies on 20 Oct 2020, available online: https://doi.org/10.1080/14782804.2020.1839395. | 329.2 kB | Adobe PDF | View/Open |
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