Contradiction and Change: Britain in the Nineties

Do you remember the 1990s in the UK? If you lived through it, you might remember the rises in multiculturalism, new technology and media, and will have experienced first-hand social, political and economic change. The 1990s witnessed a segmentation of popular British culture, and artistic and social rebellion. Were you a part of it?
The writers of this ebook were intrigued by a positive view in the literature on the 1990s which sees the decade as both a buoyant assertion of British culture and a repackaging of ‘Britannia’ for global export, thus fusing together almost everything great that had happened in British culture in the preceding 40 years. Is this how you remember it? This collection of essays takes a broad-based approach to understanding the key developments in social and cultural life in Britain in the 1990s. If you were there, reading this ebook may bring back some fond memories. And even if you weren’t, the essays make for interesting reading on a decade that has come to symbolise a turning point in recent British social history.
The essays collected here were written by postgraduate students on English Studies programmes at Trier University (Germany), who were excited to know about this (in)famous decade. They assess the extent to which 1990s developments were predictable from or reflections of phenomena observed in preceding decades, and evaluate whether and how they actually enriched society in general. The ebook is divided into three parts, namely Changing Britain, Cool Britannia and New Britain, roughly reflecting chronological progression through the decade in a number of areas.