B. S. Johnson and Post-War Literature: Possibilities of the Avant-Garde

A collection of essays on the 1960s experimental writer B.S. Johnson, this book draws together new research on all aspects of his work, and, in tracing his connections to a wider circle of continental, British and American avant-garde writers, offers exciting new approaches to reading 1960s experimental fiction. Front Matter....Pages i-ix Introduction: Avant-Garde Possibilities — B.S. Johnson and the Sixties Generation....Pages 1-13 Front Matter....Pages 15-15 Early Influences and Aesthetic Emergence: Travelling People (1961), Albert Angelo (1964), Trawl (1966) and The Unfortunates (1969)....Pages 17-34 Johnson and the nouveau roman: Trawl and other Butorian Projects....Pages 35-53 ‘Like loose leaves in the wind’: Effacement and Characterisation in B.S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates and Marc Saporta’s Composition No. 1....Pages 54-70 B.S. Johnson and the Aleatoric Novel....Pages 71-86 Cell of One: B.S. Johnson, Christie Malry and the Angry Brigade....Pages 87-102 ‘Educated and intelligent, if down-at-heel’: John Wain’s Hurry On Down and B.S. Johnson’s Albert Angelo....Pages 103-117 Front Matter....Pages 119-119 Antepostdated Johnson....Pages 121-135 Evacuating Samuel Beckett and B.S. Johnson....Pages 136-152 The Sadism of the Author or the Masochism of the Reader?....Pages 153-166 Sex, Lies and Autobiografiction: Travelling People and the Persistence of Modernism....Pages 167-182 ‘Make of Them What You Will’: The Short Prose Pieces of B.S. Johnson....Pages 183-201 B.S. Johnson, Giles Gordon and a ‘New Fiction’: The Book, the Screen and the E-book....Pages 202-216 Back Matter....Pages 217-221 Cover 1 Half-Title 2 Series 3 Title 4 Copyright 5 Contents 6 Notes on Contributors 8 Introduction: Avant-Garde Possibilities – B.S. Johnson and the Sixties Generation 11 Part I: Johnson in His Time: Influences and Contemporaries 24 1 Early Influences and Aesthetic Emergence: Travelling People (1961), Albert Angelo (1964), Trawl (1966) and The Unfortunates (1969) 25 2 Johnson and the nouveau roman: Trawl and other Butorian Projects 43 3 'Like loose leaves in the wind': Effacement and Characterisation in B.S. Johnson's The Unfortunates and Marc Saporta's Composition No. 1 62 4 B.S. Johnson and the Aleatoric Novel 79 5 Cell of One: B.S. Johnson, Christie Malry and the Angry Brigade 95 6 'Educated and intelligent, if down-at-heel': John Wain's Hurry On Down and B.S. Johnson's Albert Angelo 111 Part II: Johnson Out of Time: The Persistence of Modernism 126 7 Antepostdated Johnson 127 8 Evacuating Samuel Beckett and B.S. Johnson 142 9 The Sadism of the Author or the Masochism of the Reader? 159 10 Sex, Lies and Autobiografiction: Travelling People and the Persistence of Modernism 173 11 'Make of Them What You Will': The Short Prose Pieces of B.S. Johnson 189 12 B.S. Johnson, Giles Gordon and a 'New Fiction': The Book, the Screen and the E-book 208 Index of Authors and Works Cited 223 B.S. Johnson is increasingly a crucial figure in the ongoing reassessment of the literary scene since the Second World War. He is central to the generation from which he came (he has even been called by his biographer, Jonathan Coe, the 'one man avant-garde of the nineteen-sixties'), but he is also pivotal in wider contexts; his brand of experimental writing reaches back to Beckett and Joyce, transcends national boundaries in its kinship with avant garde continental writing, and gestures forward to a strand of contemporary literature that is similarly preoccupied with form, constraint, difficulty, and truth. B.S. Johnson and Post-War Literature builds on the growing interest in Johnson, and seeks to continue the work of recovering him, and the wider circle of sixties 'experimentalists' of which he was a part, from the marginalisation that this term sometimes implies, through the delineation of his historical, political and literary contexts