Table Of ContentTh e 1960s
A Decade of Modern British Fiction
i
Titles in Th e Decades Series
Th e 1960s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, edited by Philip Tew,
James Riley and Melanie Seddon
Th e 1970s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction, edited by Nick Hubble,
John McLeod and Philip Tew
Th e 1980s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction, edited by Philip Tew,
Emily Horton and Leigh Wilson
Th e 1990s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction, edited by Nick Hubble,
Philip Tew and Leigh Wilson
Th e 2000s: A Decade of Contemporary British Fiction, edited by Nick Bentley,
Nick Hubble and Leigh Wilson
Forthcoming
Th e 1950s: A Decade of Modern British Fiction, edited by Nick Bentley,
Alice Ferrebe and Nick Hubble
ii
Th e 1960s
A Decade of Modern British Fiction
Edited by
Philip Tew , James Riley and Melanie Seddon
iii
BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC
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First published in Great Britain 2018
Copyright © Philip Tew, James Riley, Melanie Seddon and Contributors, 2018
Philip Tew, James Riley and Melanie Seddon have asserted their rights under the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identifi ed as Editors of this work.
For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. xii constitute an extension of this
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iv
Contents
List of Figures vii
Series Editors’ Preface viii
Acknowledgements xii
Contributors xiii
Surfi ng the Sixties: Critical Introduction Philip Tew, James Riley
and Melanie Seddon 1
1 Our Troubled Youth: A Literary History of the 1960s
Melanie Seddon 27
2 Th e Housewife and the Single Girl as Archetypes in Satirical Novels
of the 1960s J oseph Darlington 59
3 British Women’s Fiction of the 1960s T racy Hargreaves 81
4 Certain Circles: Gay Fiction and Cultural Attitudes of the 1960s
Yvonne Salmon 111
5 Ways of Staying, Ways of Saying: From Black Writing in Britain to
Black British Writing G raham K. Riach 137
6 Th e 1960s Existential Fiction of John Fowles
Michelle Phillips Buchberger 165
7 Experimental British Fiction of the Sixties: Five Meta-modern
Novelists P hilip Tew 193
8 Inner Space Odyssey: Suburban Spacemen and the Cults of
Catastrophe J ames Reich 227
9 Terminal Data: J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock and the Fiction
of the Decade’s End J ames Riley 257
v
vi Contents
Timeline of Works 285
Timeline of National Events 289
Timeline of International Events 295
Biographies of Writers 301
Index 311
List of Figures
1.1 Clearing a Bombsite, E13, 1961 – John Claridge 28
1.2 Up to No Good, E1, 1963 – John Claridge 38
vii
Series Editors’ Preface
Nick Hubble, Philip Tew and Leigh Wilson
Th e series began with a focus on Contemporary British fi ction published from
1970 to the present, an expanding area of academic interest, becoming a major
area of academic study in the last twenty-fi ve years and attracting a seemingly
ever-increasing global scholarship. However, the very speed of the growth of
research in this fi eld has perhaps precluded any really nuanced analysis of its key
defi ning terms and has restricted consideration of its chronological development.
Th is series addresses such issues in an informative and structured manner
through a set of extended contributions combining wide-reaching survey work
with in-depth research-led analysis. Naturally, many older British academics
assume at least some personal knowledge in charting this fi eld, drawing on their
own life experience, but increasingly many such coordinates represent the
distant past of pre-birth or childhood not only for students, both undergraduate
and postgraduate, but also younger academics. Given that most people’s
memories of their fi rst fi ve to ten years are vague and localized, an academic
born in the early to mid-1980s will only have real fi rst-hand knowledge of less
than half these forty-plus years, while a member of the current generation of
new undergraduates, born in the very late-1990s, will have no adult experience
of the period at all. Th e apparently self-evident nature of this chronological,
experiential reality disguises the rather complex challenges it poses to any
assessment of the contemporary (or of the past in terms of precursory periods).
Th erefore, the aim of these volumes, which include timelines and biographical
information on the writers covered, is to provide the contextual framework that
is now necessary for the study of the British fi ction of these four decades and
beyond.
Each of the volumes in this Decades Series emerged from a series of workshops
hosted by the Brunel Centre for Contemporary Writing ( BCCW ) located in the
now vanished School of Arts at Brunel University London, UK . Th ese events
assembled specially invited teams of leading internationally recognized scholars
in the fi eld, together with emergent younger fi gures, in order that they might
together examine critically the periodization of initially contemporary British
viii
Series Editors’ Preface ix
fi ction (which overall chronology was later expanded by adding previous
decades as precursory fi elds of fi ction-writing) by dividing it into its four
constituent decades: the 1970s symposium was held on 12 March 2010; the
1980s on 7 July 2010; the 1990s on 3 December 2010; and the 2000s on 1 April
2011. Subsequent seminars expanding the series included the 1960s on 18 March
2015 and the 1950s on 22 April 2015. During workshops draft papers were
off ered and discussed, and ideas exchanged, ensuring both continuity and also
fruitful interaction (including productive dissonances) between authors of what
would become chapters of volumes that hopefully exceed the sum of their parts.
Th e division of the series by decade could be charged with being too obvious
and therefore rather too contentious. In the latter camp, no doubt, would be
Ferdinand Mount, who in a 2006 article for the L ondon Review of Books
concerned primarily with the 1950s, ‘Th e Doctrine of Unripe Time’, complained
‘When did decaditis fi rst strike? When did people begin to think that slicing the
past up into periods of ten years was a useful thing to do?’ However, he does
admit still that such characterization has long been associated with aesthetic
production and its relationship to a larger sense of the times. In Th e Sense of an
Ending: Studies in the Th eory of Fiction – published in 1967 during the period
covered by this volume – Frank Kermode argued so infl uentially that divisions
of time, like novels, are ways of making meaning. And clearly both can also shape
our comprehension of an ideological and aesthetic period that seem to co-exist,
but are perhaps not necessarily coterminous in their dominant infl ections. Th e
scholars involved in our BCCW symposia discussed the potential arbitrariness
of all periodizations (which at times is refl ected by contributors by extending the
parameters of the decade under scrutiny), but nevertheless acknowledged the
importance of such divisions, their experiential resonances and symbolic
possibilities. Th ey analysed the decades in question in terms of not only leading
fi gures, the cultural zeitgeist and socio-historical perspectives, but also in the
context of the changing confi guration of Britishness within larger, shift ing global
processes. Th e volume participants also reconsidered the eff ects and meaning of
headline events and cultural shift s such as the miners’ strike of 1984–85, the
collapse of communism, Blairism and Cool Britannia, 9/11 and 7/7, to name
only a very few. Perhaps ironically to prove the point about the possibilities
inherent in such an approach, in his L RB article Mount concedes that ‘For the
historian. . . if the 1950s are famous for anything, it is for being dull’, adding a
comment on the ‘shiny barbarism of the new affl uence’. Hence, even for Mount,
a decade may still possess certain unifying qualities, those shaping and shaped
by its overriding cultural mood.
