Oxford English Literary History: 1960-2000 Vol. 12: Last Of Eng

Description: The Oxford English Literary History: Volume 12: The Last of England?
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.

Review:
... 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

Table of 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. Movement or Revival - the late 1950s to the 1980s; 6. Movements and Counter-Movements - the 1960s to the 1980s; 7. Politics and Postmodernism - the late 1970s to 2000; 8. Rosebay Revived - Language, Form, and Audience for 'This Unpopular Art'; III. DRAMA; 9. A Public Art Form - the late 1950s to the 1970s; 10. Last Year in Jerulsalem - Politics and Performance after 1968; 11. 'Real Revolutionaries' - Politics and the Margins; 12. Absurdism, Postmodernism, Individualism; 13. Discovering the Body; 14. Revolution, Television, Subsidy; IV. NARRATIVE; 15. To the Crossroads - Style and Society in the 1960s and 1970s; 16. A Darker Route - Moral and Historical Vision in the 1960s and 1970s; 17. Longer Shadows and Darkness Risible - the 1970s to 2000; 18. 'Double Lives' - Women's Writing and Gender Difference; 19. 'The Century of Strangers' - Travellers and Migrants; 20. Genres, Carnivals, and Conclusions; Author Bibliographies; Suggestions for Further Reading; Works Cited; Index