| Reviews |
| - '... a helpful commentary.' - Library Journal
- 'This is an extraordinary book, both in its learning and its easy-going accessibility: an authoritative, yet truly companionable companion to modern English literature.' - The Scotsman
- 'The Last of England?
is serious, thoughtful and useful.
' - Stefan Collini, The Guardian Review
- 'If you want to get a sense of the larger patterns to be found in the kaleidoscope of recent and contemporary writing then this book is a very good place to start.' - Stefan Collini, The Guardian Review
|
| Description | | - A major new volume in The Oxford English Literary History
- Provides an indispensable, comprehensive account of the period's authors, texts, and movements
- Covers a broad range of topics, such as the rise of literary theory, of publishing and the book trade, and the pervasive influences of modernism and postmodernism
| English Literature in the 1960s soon threw off its post-war weariness and the tepid influences of the previous decade. New voices, new visions, and new commitments profoundly reshaped writing during the 60s, and throughout the rest of the century. Drama thrived on its rapidly rebuilt foundations. New freedoms of style and form revitalised fiction. Poetry, too, gradually recovered the variety
and inventiveness of earlier years.
As well as comprehensively charting these changes in the literary field, Randall Stevenson persuasively pinpoints their origins in the historical, social, and intellectual pressures of the times. Literary developments are revealingly related to the wider evolution and profound changes in English experience in the late twentieth-century to shadows of war and
loss of empire; declining influences of class; shifting relations between the genders; emergent minority and counter-cultures; and the broadening democratization of contemporary life in general.
Analyses of the rise of literary theory, of publishing and the book trade, and of the pervasive influences of modernism and postmodernism contribute further to an impressively thorough, insightful
description of writing in the later twentieth-century a literary period Stevenson shows to be far more imaginative and exciting than has yet been recognised. Lucid, accessible, and engaging, this volume of the Oxford English Literary History presents a unique illumination of its age - one we have lived through, but are only just beginning to understand. The first full account of its period, it
will set the agenda for discussion of late twentieth-century literature for many years to come.
|
Readership: Scholars and students of twentieth-century English literature across all genres.
| Contents |
Preface
I. Histories
1.
'Gleaming Twilight' - Literature, Culture, and Society
2.
A Postmodern Age? - Literature, Ideas, and Traditions
3.
An Age of Theory
? - Critics, Readers, and Authors
4.
A Golden Age? - Readers, Authors, and the Book Trade
II. Poetry
5.
Movements and Counter-Movements - the 1960s to the 1980s
6.
Politics and Postmodernism - the late 1970s to 2000
7.
Rosebay Revived - Language, Form, and Audience for 'This Unpopular Art'
III. Drama
8.
A Public Art Form - the late 1950s to the 1970s
9.
Last Year in Jerusalem - Politics and Performance After 1968
10.
'Real Revolutionaries' - Politics and the Margins
11.
Absurdism, Postmodernism, Individualism
12.
Discovering the Body
13.
Revolution, Television, Subsidy
IV. Fiction
14.
The Crossroads - Form and Society in the 1960s and 1970s
15.
A Darker Route - Moral and Historical Vision in the 1960s and 1970s
16.
Longer Shadows and Darkness Risible - the 1970s to 2000
17.
'Double Lives' - Women's Writing and Gender Difference
18.
'The Century of Strangers' - Travellers and Migrants
19.
Genres, Carnivals, and Conclusions
Author Bibliographies
Suggestions for Further Reading
Works Cited
Index
|
| Authors, editors,
and contributors |
Randall Stevenson, Reader in English Literature, University of Edinburgh
|
The specification in this catalogue, including without
limitation price, format, extent, number of illustrations,
and month of publication, was as accurate as
possible at the time the catalogue was compiled.
Occasionally, due to the nature of some contractual restrictions, we
are unable to ship a specific product to a particular territory.
Jacket images are provisional and liable to change before publication.
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