British Literature in Transition, 1960–1980: Flower Power

This volume traces transitions in British literature from 1960 to 1980, illuminating a range of authors, texts, genres and movements.

Kate McLoughlin (Edited by)

9781107129573, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 20 December 2018

404 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.7 cm, 0.72 kg

This volume traces transitions in British literature brought about by the rapid, momentous and far-reaching changes of the 1960s and 1970s, illuminating a diverse range of authors, texts, genres and movements. It looks at innovations in form, considering experimental poetry, fiction and drama, and explores the literature of emergent identities in race, gender, sexuality and class. It considers changes in attitudes and in the mind itself: the growth of environmentalism, perceptions of the past, psychedelia, the sexual revolution, and information control. It examines local and regional developments, visiting Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and northern England. Finally, it focuses on shifts within the oeuvres of individual authors - two poets, two dramatists and a novelist: Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes, Harold Pinter and Caryl Churchill, and Iris Murdoch.

Part I. Ventures in Form: 1. Error and experiment in the 1960s British novel Julia Jordan
2. 'A different inclusiveness': reading poetry from the group to the British poetry revival Hannah Brooks-Motl
3. 'A revolutionary proposal': Alexander Trocchi, dramaturgies of disruption and situationist genealogies Grant Tyler Peterson
Part II. Emergent Identities: 4. 'Sight, sounds and meaning': voice/print transitions in black British poetry Rachael Gilmour
5. Fate and freedom in the fiction of the second wave Abigail Rine Favale
6. Affluence and its discontents: working-class literature of the 1960s and 1970s Katy Shaw
7. Coming out: the emergence of gay literature Alison Hennegan
Part III. Changing Minds: 8. From countryside to environment: reaching common ground Terry Gifford
9. Nostalgia and the elegiac mode Marina MacKay
10. The spiderhood: psychedelic literature, literary psychedelia and the writing of LSD James Riley
11. 'Little things': writing the sexual revolution Claire O'Callaghan
12. Inhuman factors: the intelligence of British spy fiction David Pascoe
Part IV. Local and Regional Developments
13. In and out of the nation: Poetry Wales in the 1960s and 1970s Matthew Jarvis
14. Performing on the fringe: Basil Bunting and Morden Tower Edward Allen
15. Rejecting the knitted claymore: the challenge to cultural nationalism in Scottish literary magazines of the 1960s and 1970s Eleanor Bell
16. Oh so loinerly: geographical transitions and the struggle to belong in Tony Harrison's The Loiners Rory Waterman
17. The end of 'home': Heaney, Muldoon and the return of the dead Peter Mackay
Part V. Individual Transitions: 18. Iris Murdoch: an anatomy of failure James Clements
19. Larkin's light Kate McLoughlin
20. 'Operating on life, not in it': gender and relationships in the plays of Harold Pinter Mark Taylor-Batty
21. 'The small box': Ted Hughes and the figure of the child S. J. Perry
22. Caryl Churchill and the vectors of unhappiness Rachel Clements.

Subject Areas: Literary reference works [DSR], Literary studies: from c 1900 - [DSBH], Literature: history & criticism [DS]