Literature: British Literature from the 1960s and 1970s

The 1970s is often a decade that is passed over by literary studies, but as this course will demonstrate, it was a decade that produced much fine writing across a range of genres. This course will sample several of these genres: the spy-novel, the historical novel, the legacy of Britain’s imperial past and that of the Great War, as well as charting the transient lives of those on the fringes of society in the novel Berg.

There will be many opportunities to discuss and comment on the issues raised by these novels, which tackle the British Class System, the nature of historical memory, and the growing sense of disillusion that populated British society and culture in the 1970s. The course offers a chance to revisit novels with which you may be familiar, and those by authors that are new to you, prompting in both instances a desire to read further into other works by these selected novelists.

Discussion of each text will include an assessment of literary worth, prose styles and the continuing relevance of these novels to our sense of ourselves and the society we live in, which has inherited the legacy of the vast changes that occurred in the 1970s.