ABSTRACT
Fear of youth subcultures gripped the British media tightly in the 1960s, an ironic condition given the fact that the teenager was largely manufactured by the advertising industry and by post-war capitalism. Although hopes for the creation of a radical common culture endured among the members of the New Left, moral panic about the supposedly amoral violence and ersatz, bubblegum culture of the young was quick to spread among authors and critics. As youth counterculture developed, however, it absorbed and echoed many of the critiques of consumer culture articulated by the Left. Britain was catapulted briefly to prominence as the center of global cool by its youth counterculture. Despite this fact, an authoritarian backlash against the perceived excesses of the counterculture set in quickly. At the heart of the counterculture was a critique of the forms of passivity and superficiality promoted by consumer society. Women were particular objects of this spectacle, and also its greatest victims. As the counterculture fragmented, the feminist movement reawakened many of the struggles engaged earlier in the century, searching for find appropriate literary forms in which to express women’s search for self in a patriarchal society. Britain’s turn towards authoritarianism was particularly evident during The Troubles in Northern Ireland, where authors looked to literature to offer imaginative alternatives to the seemingly intractable legacy of British imperialism.
