British Literature in Transition – serie

The literature of twentieth-century Britain's final twenty years represents a crash course in transitional history. In the aftermath of the 1970s, the nation's hopes of becoming more efficient were high, leading to the fundamental domestic shake-up that was Margaret Thatcher's neoliberal revolution (1979-90). Following the end of the Cold War, Europe was undergoing radical rejuvenation, while the world as a whole began to thrive on new levels of connectivity and proximity brought through rapid advances in communication technology. Later, in the 1990s, Britons were asked to countenance not only internal devolution, but also the crystallisation of a brand-new European and global order. This volume shows how British literature recorded contemporaneous historical change. It traces the emergence and evolution of literary trends as well as enduring transitional shifts in genre, tone, style and thematic preoccupation.

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.

Literature from the 'political' 1930s has often been read in contrast to the 'aesthetic' 1920s. This collection suggests a different approach. Drawing on recent work expanding our sense of the political and aesthetic energies of interwar modernisms, these chapters track transitions in British literature. The strains of national break-up, class dissension and political instability provoked a new literary order, and reading across the two decades between the wars exposes the continuing pressure of these transitions. Instead of following familiar markers - 1922, the Crash, the Spanish Civil War - or isolating particular themes from literary study, this collection takes key problems and dilemmas from literature 'in transition' and reads them across familiar and unfamiliar cultural works and productions, in their rich and contradictory context of publication. Themes such as gender, sexuality, nation and class are thus present throughout these essays. Major writers such as Woolf are read alongside forgotten and marginalised voices.