Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter i
2. Contents v
3. Acknowledgements vii
4. Introduction: ‘The avant-garde must not be romanticized. The avant-garde must not be dismissed’ 1
5. Contributors 1
6. 1. Muriel Spark and the Possibility of Popular Experiment 20
7. 2. B. S. Johnson: The Book as Dynamic Object 36
8. 3. Giles Gordon: Beyond the Words and Beyond the Language of Experimentalism 54
9. 4. Brigid Brophy’s Aestheticism: The Camp Anti-Novel 72
10. 5. Alexander Trocchi: Man at Leisure 90
11. 6. Anna Kavan: Pursuing the ‘in-between reality’ Hidden by the ‘ordinary surface of things’ 107
12. 7. J. G. Ballard: Visuality and the Novels of the Near Future 125
13. 8. Ann Quin: ‘infuriating’ Experiments? 143
14. 9. Contradiction, Incongruity and Fragmentation: Political and Avant-Garde Compromise in the Work of Alan Burns 160
15. 10. Eva Figes: Tracing the Survival of a ‘Poetry of the Inarticulate’ 176
16. 11. Christine Brooke-Rose: The Development of Experiment 193
17. 12. Aspirations Inevitably Failing: Hope and Negativity in Rayner Heppenstall’s Experimental Fiction of the 1960s 210
18. 13. Maureen Duffy: The Politics of Experimental Fiction 231
19. 14. Not the Last Word on the Sixties Avant-Garde: An Afterword 248
20. Notes on Contributors 262
21. Index 266