Both literary experimentation and periodization are complex, contestable acts. All chronological groupings are potentially arbitrary. Yet a logical starting point for the parameters of postwar fiction is the cessation of major hostilities in 1945. Subsequently the nation punctuates a historical and ideological shift to the left with the Labour government's landslide election, defeating Winston Churchill. Much postwar fiction is imbued by politicization in response to the prevailing leftist ideological consciousness, which validated the consensus welfarism inspired by the Beveridge Report and the Labour victory.

As to when the postwar literary phase ends, generational and aesthetic changes occur in the mid to late 1970s, alongside seismic cultural and historical transformations. The 1973 oil crisis, the miners'strike, and the three-day week erode the long-standing Zeitgeist defined by a consensus familiar to babyboomers. Any residual ideological common ground collapses with the 1979 election of Margaret Thatcher, confirming another juncture in culture, ideology, and aesthetics. Following the lead of such historical landmarks, I focus on innovative novelists from 1945 to 1979, particularly on experimental texts that Bernard Bergonzi in The Situation of the Novel (1970) characterizes as “at a considerable distance from the well-made realistic novel as conventionally understood.”

Which elements of form and content justify characterizing particular acts of textualization or authorship as “experimental?” As Émile Zola explains in The Experimental Novel and Other Essays (1893), naturalistic novels with their panoptic vision were originally considered experimental. For Zola such writing responds to the logic of matter and science (16).