Help? on literary trends

[golden-bastet.livejournal.com]

On a fact-findinng mission...

Also, if there's some sort of protocol here about asking questions, please let me know.

A bit of an odd question, but here goes:

I need to find out (1) what literary writing styles were trendy in late 70s UK; and (2) what types of books the lads were reading during the series. I know a few have been mentioned, but am not sure of what beyond Ivan Denisovich.

"Literary writing styles" could be stream of consciousness, post-post modernism, deconstructism, something else: it just has to be *trendy,* what a writer looking for publicity / audience over quality might have been aiming for. I'd expect it to be dead by now. :D

These two things - (1) vs (2) - should be mutually exclusive.

Didn't find anything on little_details, but will check again.

Thanks ~ :D

Comments

[hutchynstarsk.livejournal.com]

"Your friend Harold Robbins." Didn't Cowley say that to Bodie?
Of course that would be popular fiction, not literary.

[golden-bastet.livejournal.com]

Cool - thanks for that, I actually don't remember hearing that one!

[hutchynstarsk.livejournal.com]

It's in the episode where Bodie breaks into that lady's house and pretends it was to steal a couple of fivers from the drawer. Slush Fund, I think? :-D

He also drinks vodka and bullion (sp?). A regular connoisseur our Bodie. ;)

[dawnebeth.livejournal.com]

I could see Doyle being somewhat interested in Marshall McLuhen
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marshall_McLuhan
He wasn't particularly a writer in a literary style, but he was the first one to really study media and his books--particularly Understanding Media, which was written in the sixties, were still being discussed. He coined the medium is the message and global village.

Stephan King's the Dead Zone made the top ten in 1979, and as the above post says--Harold Robbins was quite popular.

[golden-bastet.livejournal.com]

Actually, McLuhan could be very handy, because that's *really* what the trendiness is pointing to - selling books, rather than writing literature.

You've introduced a pretty interesting twist - thanks for that!

[dawnebeth.livejournal.com]

kewl!

[squeeful.livejournal.com]

I don't know if any literary writing styles were trendy, unless you count Vonnegut who is almost a style himself? But various genres were and genre fiction itself saw a surge in popularity. Horror as a genre emerged and was wildly popular, thanks greatly to Stephen King. Non-fiction crime and exposes were big. So were gothic romances.

[golden-bastet.livejournal.com]

Hmmmm - Vonnegut is probably too good a writer for this, but I could use the genre idea, maybe non-fiction crime or the expose...

Thanks for the info!

[callistosh65.livejournal.com]

I remember my mum going through a lot of Wilbur Smiths back then. Stephen King was HUGE in Britain, as was Harold Robbins. And Doyle - ever the esoteric one - was reading Michael's Herr's Dispatches in one episode. (A fabulous account of Vietnam).

[golden-bastet.livejournal.com]

Thanks - I'll check into these, I can see them being useful, too!

[angel-ci5.livejournal.com]

I'm sure there's a post somewhere about books in canon, but according to my notes, we see Doyle read The Sands of Torremolinos by Juan Goytisolo, Ten Years After Ivan Denisovich by Zhores Medvedev and an unidentifiable Penguin classic, as well as Michael Herr's Dispatches, which callistosh65 mentioned. Oh, and Doyle says he's read Timothy Leary's The Game of Life. :-)

[golden-bastet.livejournal.com]

Doyle's pretty well read, when you think about it... or at least he's got a pretty wide-ranging variety of subjects that he likes to coevr.

I've gotten quite a lot of really good possibilities with ths - and I might try to read a couple I haven't gotten to yet.

Thanks a lot!

[moth2fic.livejournal.com]

Some suggestions: The Gulag Archipelago (Solzhenitsyn) was very much discussed, although it was a 'true' story, and it was perhaps instrumental in getting people to read 'modern' Russian novels such as The Devil and Margarita - a kind of political satire meets magic realism style that tied into a growing 'respectability' for sci-fi (Squeeful mentions Vonnegut). Then people were still avidly reading Fowles' The Magus and his The French Lieutenant's Woman. Magic Realism was increasingly popular but Rushdie's Midnight's Children was probably too late for your purposes - 1981. Writers like Marquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude) were gradually becoming widespread in translation. (I'm looking at what intelligent people in general were reading rather than what intellectuals/English undergraduates were interested in.) Or if you google The Booker Prize and choose the .pdf for 1975 onwards, you'll find the books that were in the news at the time and you can see at a glance which authors were much read or at least much discussed. I tried to get the URL for you but it insisted on turning itself into the URL for 2009 onwards so I gave up.

[golden-bastet.livejournal.com]

Wow, I've actually read several of these - which would help in writing more generally about them. :) And the Booker Prize is an excellent idea, too.

I could also have the character attempt to write a book "in the style of" - so rather than trendy, it comes across as mimicking... Quite a bit of food for thought. :)

Thanks for the advice!