ABSTRACT
There are a number of obvious developments in the British novel of the 1960s through which the concept of ‘cultural revolution’ could be explored. For instance, in the early part of the decade especially, a distinctive group of writers-including Storey, Barstow and Williams-built on the foundation provided by Sillitoe and Braine in the late 1950s to provide challenging explorations of the changing identities of class.1 Of equal note was the tentative emergence of a new aesthetic in women’s writing, prompted by increasing mobilization round issues of gender of which Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook (1962) is the prototype. However, such writing only gathers momentum at the end of the decade. Fresh kinds of ‘experimental’ writing also began to appear, providing a radical challenge to established narrative conventions and, more debatably, to the social assumptions supporting them.2 B.S. Johnson was possibly the most interesting domestic writer attempting to reorient the genre in light of reconsiderations of modernism and experiments abroad such as the nouveau roman.
