The British Society in the 1980s and the 1990s Reflected in the Poems of Carol Ann Duffy

摘要

As the first Scottish and first woman to be appointed as Britain's Poet Laureate, Carol Ann Duffy, by using the weapon of poetry, addresses a wide range of issues related to her people and her gender, including social, economic and gender oppressions confronted with by the working class of Britain. This paper, by analyzing the social situations of Britain in the 1980s and 1990s under the administration of Margaret Thatcher, studies Carol Ann Duffy's poems, mainly those from the three collections Selling Manhattan, Standing Female Nude and The Other Country, from the perspective of their reflection of the then British society. It studies in detail Duffy's poems and reveals three main aspects of the British society in the Thatcherite world: commercialism and moneymaking elevated as the top notion of people, selfishness and aimlessness among the young generation along with the state of despair and severe unemployment, and racial and cultural intolerance in the multicultural Britain.