Between Tradition and Experiment:

1
Between Tradition and Experiment

• British Fiction from the Sixties On

2
Philip Larkin, Annus Mirabilis

• Sexual intercourse beganIn nineteen
  sixty-three(which was rather late for me)
  -Between the end of the "Chatterley" banAnd the
  Beatles' first LP.Up to then there'd only
  beenA sort of bargaining,A wrangle for the
  ring,A shame that started at sixteenAnd spread
  to everything

• Then all at once the quarrel sankEveryone felt
  the same,And every life becameA brilliant
  breaking of the bank,A quite unlosable game.So
  life was never better thanIn nineteen
  sixty-three(Though just too late for me)
  -Between the end of the "Chatterley" banAnd the
  Beatles' first LP.

3
Terms to watch for

• Poststructuralism
• Postmodernism
• Intertextuality
• Metafiction
• Magic realism
• Mass- or pop-culture (youth subcultures)

4
Jean Rhys (1894-1979)

• Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
• Short stories

5
Iris Murdoch (1919-1999)

• Under the Net (1954)
• The Bell (1958)
• Brunos Dream (1969)
• The Black Prince (1973)
• The Sea, the Sea (1978)
• Muriel Spark (1918-2006)
• The Comforters (1957)
• Memento Mori (1959)
• The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie (1961)
• The Drivers Seat (1970)
• The Abbess of Crewe (1974)

6
Doris Lessing (1919-)

• The Grass Is Singing (1950)
• Children of Violence
• (a five-volume sequence, 1952-69)
• The Golden Notebook (1962)
• The Good Terrorist (1985)
• The Cleft (2007)
• The Nobel Prize in Literature 2007 was awarded to
  Doris Lessing "that epicist of the female
  experience, who with scepticism, fire and
  visionary power has subjected a divided
  civilisation to scrutiny".

7
The structure of The Golden Notebook

• FREE WOMEN 1
• The Black Notebook
• The Red Notebook
• The Yellow Notebook
• The Blue Notebook
• repeated four times
• THE GOLDEN NOTEBOOK
• FREE WOMEN 5

8
Angela Carter (1940-92)

• The Magic Toyshop (1967)
• The Passion of New Eve (1977)
• Nights at the Circus (1984)
• Wise Children (1991)
• Two volumes of gothic stories

9
Jaenette Winterson (1959-)

• Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit (1984)
• The Passion (1987)
• Sexing the Cherry (1989)
• Written on the Body (1991)
• The PowerBook (2000)
• Lighthousekeeping (2004)

10
Anthony Burgess (1917-93)

• The Malayan Trilogy
• A Clockwork Orange (1962)
• MF (1971)
• Earthly Powers (1980)
• A Dead Man in Deptford (1993)

11
John Fowles (1926-2005)

• The Collector (1963)
• The Magus (1966)
• The French Lieutenants Woman (1969)
• Mantissa (1982)
• A Maggot (1985)

12
Antonia S. Byatt (1936-)

• Possession 1990
• Peter Ackroyd (1949-)
• The Great Fire of London (1982)
• The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde (1983)
• Hawksmoor (1985)
• The House of Doctor Dee (1993)
• Milton in America (1996)

13
Julian Barnes (1946-)

• Metroland (1980)
• Flauberts Parrot (1984)
• A History of the World in 10 ½ Cahpters (1989)
• Talking It Over (1991)
• England, England (1998)