British Avant-Garde Fiction of the 1960s

Kaye Mitchell is Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Literature and Director of the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester. She has published three monographs, most recently Writing Shame: Contemporary Literature, Gender and Negative Affect (2020). Her editorial publications include a collection of essays on the British author Sarah Waters (2013), a special issue of Contemporary Women’s Writing (2015) on experimental women’s writing, and a co-edited collection of essays (with Nonia Williams), British Avant-Garde Fiction of the 1960s (2019). Kaye is the UK editor of the journal Contemporary Women’s Writing, is on the editorial board of Open Gender in Germany and C21 in the UK, and is a series editor of Bloomsbury’s ‘Contemporary Critical Perspectives’ series. Nonia Williams is a Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of East Anglia. Recent publications include ‘(Re)turning to Quin: An Introduction’ in Women: A Cultural Review (2022); ‘“Designing its Own Shadow”: tracing Ann Quin’s reiterative experimental processes’ (2021); ‘About/Of Madness: Ann Quin's The Unmapped Country’ in Textual Practice (2020) and British Avant-Garde Fiction of the 1960s (EUP, 2019).

• Introduction: ‘The avant-garde must not be romanticized. The avant-garde must not be dismissed’, Kaye MitchellMuriel Spark and the possibility of popular experiment, Marina McKayB.S. Johnson: the book as dynamic object’, Joseph DarlingtonGiles Gordon: Beyond the Words, and beyond the language of experimentalism, David HucklesbyBrigid Brophy’s aestheticism: the camp anti-novel, Len GutkinAlexander Trocchi: Man at leisure, Christopher WebbOpen Access: Anna Kavan: Pursuing the ‘in-between reality’ hidden by the ‘ordinary surface of things’, Hannah Van HoveJ.G. Ballard: Visuality and the novels of the near future, Natalie FerrisAnn Quin: ‘infuriating’ experiments?, Nonia WilliamsContradiction, Incongruity and Fragmentation: Political and Avant-Garde Compromise in the Work of Alan Burns, Kieran DevaneyEva Figes: tracing the survival of a ‘poetry of the inarticulate’, Chris ClarkeChristine Brooke-Rose: the development of experiment, Stephanie JonesAspirations inevitably failing: hope and negativity in Rayner Heppenstall’s experimental fiction of the 1960s, Philip TewMaureen Duffy: the politics of experimental fiction, Eveline KilianNot the Last Word on the Sixties Avant Garde: An Afterword, Glyn WhiteIndex

[...] an important and timely book for all scholars of twentieth-century British fiction, particularly those interested in formal innovation [...]