British Literature in Transition / The Spiderhood

I was very happy to be involved in this new volume from Cambridge University Press: British Literature in Transition, 1960-1980: Flower Power. Edited by Kate McLoughlin, its an excellent volume featuring some wonderful essays covering the entire period. For my part, I wrote on psychedelia and psychedelic literature. Abstract: 

The Spiderhood: Psychedelic Literature, Literary Psychedelia and the Writing of LSD

With reference to Harry Fainlight’s ‘The Spider’ (1965), Michael Moorcock’s The Final Programme (1968) and Alexander Trocchi’s ‘Drugs of the Mind’ (1970) (amongst others) this chapter explores the intertextuality of psychedelic writing and assesses the possibility of identifying a psychedelic literary discourse. Coined by Humphry Osmond and Aldous Huxley in 1957, ‘psychedelic’ was offered as an alternative term to ‘psychotomimetic’ and was intended to encapsulate the apparently generative rather than imitative qualities of LSD and mescaline. The word’s rise to cultural prominence during the 1960s mirrors a transition within the personal sphere as well as the surrounding political and economic macrocosm of post-war Britain. Literary psychedelia, the chapter argues, is writing that combines a particularized subject position with the rich cultural resonance that Huxley fed into the term in order to construct a formal structure reflective and interrogative of these wider social shifts.  

Key Words: Psychedelia, Psychedelic, hallucination, experimental, drugs, recording, the sixties, counterculture, underground literature. 

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