Literature of the 1950s and 1960s

The Yearbook of English Studies 2012 is devoted to the literature and wider culture of Britain in the 1950s and 1960s and is co-edited by Alice Ferrebe (Senior Lecturer in English at Liverpool John Moores University) and Tracy Hargreaves (Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Leeds). In this rich collection, the reader is invited to rediscover these decades as a time of cultural renegotiation and renewal. Insofar as such a critically undervalued period can be said to have a canon, the collection engages with it, reconsidering texts by an assortment of Angry Young Men, as well as the work of Anthony Burgess, John Fowles, Doris Lessing and Muriel Spark. Yet its debates range further, from experimental work like that of Samuel Beckett and B. S. Johnson, across popular and middle-brow writing by, for example, Len Deighton, Ian Fleming, and Rose Macaulay, and to neglected authors such as E. R. Braithwaite.