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/lit/ - Literature

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11335483 No.11335483 [Reply] [Original]

What's the British equivalent of the beat generation?

It seems to me that British (or at least English) literature never had a moment where ''common''' people began writing books and has always remained the domain of posh men.

>inb4 thousands of comments explaining why that's good

>> No.11335501

>>11335483
Brit equivalent of the Beats was the Angry Young Men. This is absolutely disputable, but I'll fight cunts over it.

For me, the most obviously citeable is The Loneliness of the Middle-Distance Runner but there's obviously plenty of other stuff out there.

>> No.11335510

>>11335501

Were they actually widely read though? The only writer from the Angry Young Men I still see in bookshops is Kingsley Amis and he was the most middle class

It could just be I'm a brainlet and haven't noticed their books

>> No.11335511

>>11335510
Are you a Brit or a Yank or otherwise? (I am an aussie and a socialist who has looked this stuff up especially, so I have a different angle on the whole thing)

>> No.11335515

>>11335511

I'm a brit with a limited experience of literature

>> No.11335535

>>11335515
I suppose I'd say that, today, neither the Beats nor the AYM are much read. The Beats are read a bit more widely in this internet intellectual circle than the AYM, but we're decades on from it and only silly nerds like us read books anyway. Part of that is just marketing - Penguin publishes Kerouac and Ginsburg and Burroughs, and On The Road was made into a movie recently. We're always talking percentages of percentages of a shrinking market.

But this is a different question to the more historical point about the "common" people starting to write books. The AYM did inaugurate a period in literary history - both in the UK and in the colonies, which is why I give a fuck - which saw plenty of interesting (literarily, socially and politically) works produced by common-as-dirty working-class scum like me.

For working-class literature, you need to look around hard, but you ALWAYS need to start looking - this goes back to the start, back to The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists or even earlier (even Blake and Shakespeare can be invoked in the tradition). This won't change until the last awful copy of the Socialist Worker is thrown into a recycle bin.

>> No.11335539

>>11335483
Spike Milligan?

>> No.11335540

>inb4 canceled
So the brits never had a fat pedophile jew wrangling together and advancing the careers of a bunch of mediocre writers who would undermine the culture and promote degeneracy. :=(

>> No.11335545

>It seems to me that British (or at least English) literature never had a moment where ''common''' people began writing books and has always remained the domain of posh men.
wtf is the 17th century, everyone was a fucking commoner

>> No.11335554

>>11335483
Brits had an odd string of experimentalists, usually highly focused on Cold War Britain, Typographic experiments, or the place of the English language within Europe as a whole (Christine Brooke-Rose's Between is the best example of that).

Check out Francis Booth's 'Amongst Those Left: The British Experimental Novel 1940-1980'. Dalkey might be releasing a revised edition in the future but the ebook is mostly free on google books. Everyone listed in the book is interesting, but it doesn't survey more popular authors like Ballard as it assumes you already know them.

>> No.11335557
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11335557

>>11335540
this is a bad post you should feel bad. do you know anything about the Beats, the AYM, the period, or anything at all? no you didn't offer it up you just made some shit mention of the jews.

Piss off.

>> No.11335572

>>11335557
I was reading the Beats when you were in grad school, chum.

>> No.11335696
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11335696

>>11335572
cool, cool. So what about the AYM? Or how about them Jews eh?

>> No.11335725
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11335725

>>11335696
Aren't you British? The Jews are running your nation into the ground, better wake up and drop the petty irony, m8.

>> No.11335731

>>11335483
The 18th and 19th century. God bless the crown and not the current kikes

>> No.11335737

>>11335725
>reading the telegraph
oh that's too good

>> No.11336238

A Kestrel for a Knave
A Taste of Honey
DH Lawrence was a coal miners son but did have a scholarship to a fairly posh school in Nottingham.

Ginsberg and Kerouac went to Columbia. Burroughs went to Harvard.

>> No.11336247

I wonder if anyone from the mod movement was a decent writer?

>> No.11336267

>>11335483
Brits didn't have Beats and don't seem to get Beat literature. (See: Zadie Smith)

>>11336247
There was one big mod novel, "Absolute Beginners"

>> No.11336642
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11336642

>>11335483
Rudyard Kipling wasn't exactly a "commoner" in the sense that he lived a hard life as a starving artist, but he was an everyman who wrote bawdy literature about other everymen.

That said, his actual writing, which was playful but still very measured, is a far cry from the amphetamine prose of the beats.

If nothing else, Kipling is decidedly not posh.