British Literature in Transition, 1960–1980: Flower Power British Literature in Transition Series

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.

Part I. Ventures in Form: 1. Error and experiment in the 1960s British novel Julia Jordan; 2. 'A different inclusiveness': reading poetry from the group to the British poetry revival Hannah Brooks-Motl; 3. 'A revolutionary proposal': Alexander Trocchi, dramaturgies of disruption and situationist genealogies Grant Tyler Peterson; Part II. Emergent Identities: 4. 'Sight, sounds and meaning': voice/print transitions in black British poetry Rachael Gilmour; 5. Fate and freedom in the fiction of the second wave Abigail Rine Favale; 6. Affluence and its discontents: working-class literature of the 1960s and 1970s Katy Shaw; 7. Coming out: the emergence of gay literature Alison Hennegan; Part III. Changing Minds: 8. From countryside to environment: reaching common ground Terry Gifford; 9. Nostalgia and the elegiac mode Marina MacKay; 10. The spiderhood: psychedelic literature, literary psychedelia and the writing of LSD James Riley; 11. 'Little things': writing the sexual revolution Claire O'Callaghan; 12. Inhuman factors: the intelligence of British spy fiction David Pascoe; Part IV. Local and Regional Developments; 13. In and out of the nation: Poetry Wales in the 1960s and 1970s Matthew Jarvis; 14. Performing on the fringe: Basil Bunting and Morden Tower Edward Allen; 15. Rejecting the knitted claymore: the challenge to cultural nationalism in Scottish literary magazines of the 1960s and 1970s Eleanor Bell; 16. Oh so loinerly: geographical transitions and the struggle to belong in Tony Harrison's The Loiners Rory Waterman; 17. The end of 'home': Heaney, Muldoon and the return of the dead Peter Mackay; Part V. Individual Transitions: 18. Iris Murdoch: an anatomy of failure James Clements; 19. Larkin's light Kate McLoughlin; 20. 'Operating on life, not in it': gender and relationships in the plays of Harold Pinter Mark Taylor-Batty; 21. 'The small box': Ted Hughes and the figure of the child S. J. Perry; 22. Caryl Churchill and the vectors of unhappiness Rachel Clements.

Kate McLoughlin is Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford, and Fellow and Tutor in English Literature at Harris Manchester College. Her publications include Authoring War: The Literary Representation of War from the 'Iliad' to Iraq (Cambridge, 2011) (a CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title) and Veteran Poetics: British Literature in the Age of Mass Warfare, 1790–2015 (2018) and, as editor, The Cambridge Companion to War Writing (2009), The Modernist Party 2013) and, with Santanu Das, The First World War: Literature, Culture, Modernity (2018).