Angry young men : a new literature for a changing society

Abstract

In the last ten years in England a new literature has appeared. In a country that has been largely without a literature - at least in any essential sense of the term - for over 50 years, this is in itself an important enough event. But I would not have offered a lecture on this subject to a Maltese audience if the significance of this new movement was purely literary. For one thing a period of less than ten years is not long enough for anyone to be able to estimate the actual literary achievement so far - though I think already it is considerable. In the theatre especially a recent comment by a well-known critic that 'not since the 1st Elisabethan flowering has so much relevant energy been at work on our stages' is no exaggeration.