B.S. Johnson and Post-War Literature

By: Martin Ryle and Julia Jordan

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Synopsis: 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.