Culture, politics and form in the long nineteen sixties: reappraising the British experimental novel

The critical field surrounding mid to late twentieth-century British fiction is undergoing significant revision and expansion. Contesting long-held presuppositions that render postwar writing as secondary or transitional within the wider literary-historical narrative, recent scholarship has uncovered a rich variety of responses to the challenging legacies of literary modernism and a rapidly changing socio-cultural sphere. Building on this momentum, this thesis considers the British experimental novel of the long nineteen sixties (c.1858-c.1974), elucidating the underexplored, and sometimes unexpected points of contact between experimental fiction and its wider historical, cultural and socio-political contexts. While recent accounts have done much to reinstate postwar experimentalism within the field, the tendency remains to describe a somewhat deracinated and anomalous British avant-garde, and the often-shared conceptual territory explored by writers across the postwar aesthetic ‘divide’ remains obscure. Against interpretations that stress its oppositionality, this study advances a more complex picture of the experimental novel’s orientation to the dominant literary, intellectual and political cultures of its time. Considering works by B.S. Johnson, Christine Brooke-Rose, Ann Quin and J.G. Ballard, this thesis reads these authors’ formal innovations through and against the socio-cultural transformations of postwar Britain. Specifically, it advances an understanding of their novels as formal mediations of the conflicting discourses of the era, from the antagonisms engendered by prevalent conceptions of class, masculinity, individual and society; the formulations of race, culture and nationhood that emerged in the wake of imperial collapse; the ambiguously interwoven freedoms and proscriptions of the ‘permissive society’; and the strained interrelation between the aesthetic and ethical imperatives of postwar urban development.