The 1960s

A Decade of Modern British Fiction

Philip Tew, James Riley, Melanie Seddon, Philip Tew, James Riley, Melanie Seddon

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781350011687
• eBook ISBN: 9781350011700
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

How did social, cultural and political events in Britain during and leading up to the 1960s shape modern British fiction? The 1960s were the "swinging decade": a newly energised youth culture went hand-in-hand with new technologies, expanding educational opportunities, new social attitudes and profound political differences between the generations. This volume explores the ways in which these apparently seismic changes were reflected in British fiction of the decade. Chapters cover feminist writing that fused the personal and the political, gay, lesbian and immigrant voices and the work of visionary experimental and science fiction writers.
A major critical re-evaluation of the decade, this volume covers such writers as J.G. Ballard, Anthony Burgess, A.S. Byatt, Angela Carter, John Fowles, Christopher Isherwood, Doris Lessing, Michael Moorcock and V.S. Naipaul.

Table of contents

• Cover page
• Halftitle page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Contributors
• Surfing the Sixties: Critical Introduction
• 1 Our Troubled Youth: A Literary History of the 1960s
• 2 The Housewife and the Single Girl as Archetypes in Satirical Novels of the 1960s
• 3 British Women’s Fiction of the 1960s
• 4 Certain Circles: Gay Fiction and Cultural Attitudes of the 1960s
• 5 Ways of Staying, Ways of Saying: From Black Writing in Britain to Black British Writing
• 6 The 1960s Existential Fiction of John Fowles
• 7 Experimental British Fiction of the Sixties: Five Meta-modern Novelists
• 8 Inner Space Odyssey: Suburban Spacemen and the Cults of Catastrophe
• 9 Terminal Data: J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock and the Fiction of the Decade’s End
• Timeline of Works
• Timeline of National Events
• Timeline of International Events
• Biographies of Writers
• Index