British Avant-Garde Fiction of the 1960s

Explores the trailblazing work of the British literary avant-garde of the 1960s This collection showcases the liveliness of British avant-garde fiction of the 1960s: which is diverse in its aesthetic practices and (sometimes) divided in its politics; which both embraces and shuns its own description as ‘experimental’; which takes on myriad influences, often in a piecemeal fashion, from Europe and the US; which speaks – whether erratically, poignantly or irreverently – to the continuing fallout of the second World War and the decline of the British Empire; which looks back to modernism, while declaring itself weary of literary traditions to date; which often seems to hold in tension the exhilaration of innovation and the torpor of a kind of aesthetic exhaustion. Via detailed readings of authors such as Ann Quin, B.S. Johnson, Alexander Trocchi, Maureen Duffy, Alan Burns, Christine Brooke-Rose and many others, the contributors contend that the 1960s is an even more vibrant period of literary experiment in Britain than might previously have been supposed – and that the avant-garde fiction produced then rewards our renewed attention to it