British Avant-Garde Fiction of the 1960s

Dr Kaye Mitchell is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at the University of Manchester. She is the author of Intention and the Text: Towards an Intentionality of Literary Form (Continuum, 2008) and A L Kennedy (Palgrave, 2007) and the editor of Sarah Waters: Contemporary Critical Perspectives (Bloomsbury, 2013).

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. It brings together a selection of original, research-led essays on more than a dozen avant-garde British writers of the decade, revealing this to be a crucial - and crucially overlooked - period of British literary history.

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 reveal the diversity of material produced in this period and trace the complex relations of influence and indebtedness between the 60s avant-garde, earlier modernisms and later postmodern writing. The volume shows that this decade 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.

Kaye Mitchell is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at the University of Manchester.
Nonia Williams is Lecturer in English Literature at the University of East Anglia.


Cover image: Untitled © Ron Sandford

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Note: these ISBNs are different from the original brief.
ISBN 978-1-4744-3619-9 [PPC]
ISBN 978-1-4744-3620-5 [cover]
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Introduction: 'The avant-garde must not be romanticized. The avant-garde must not be dismissed', Kaye Mitchell; 1. Muriel Spark and the possibility of popular experiment, Marina McKay; 2. B.S. Johnson: the book as dynamic object', Joseph Darlington; 3. Giles Gordon: Beyond the Words, and beyond the language of experimentalism, David Hucklesby; 4. Brigid Brophy's aestheticism: the camp anti-novel, Len Gutkin; 5. Alexander Trocchi: Man at leisure, Christopher Webb; 6. Anna Kavan: Pursuing the 'in-between reality' hidden by the 'ordinary surface of things', Hannah Van Hove; 7. J.G. Ballard: Visuality and the novels of the near future, Natalie Ferris; 8. Ann Quin: 'infuriating' experiments?, Nonia Williams; 9. Contradiction, Incongruity and Fragmentation: Political and Avant-Garde Compromise in the Work of Alan Burns, Kieran Devaney; 10. Eva Figes: tracing the survival of a 'poetry of the inarticulate', Chris Clarke; 11. Christine Brooke-Rose: the development of experiment, Stephanie Jones; 12. Aspirations inevitably failing: hope and negativity in Rayner Heppenstall's experimental fiction of the 1960s, Philip Tew; 13. Maureen Duffy: the politics of experimental fiction, Eveline Kilian; 14. Not the Last Word on the Sixties Avant Garde: An Afterword, Glyn White; Index.