From Modernism to the Counterculture: Reassessing the 1962 Edinburgh International Writers’ Conference

This seminar, held on Thursday 23rd May 2019, was the culmination of three months' research at IASH into the Edinburgh International Writers’ Conference of 1962. The Writers’ Conference was a landmark event in the history of twentieth century experimental letters, and the subject of a section in a book I am writing on the American literary movement, the Beat Generation. By bringing together experts on the event, and in mid century Scottish, British and American literature generally, I aimed to encourage a discussion of its significance in literary history – as a site where links were forged and consolidated between literary scenes in the old world and the new, geographically between English language writing in Britain and America, and politically and aesthetically between the modernisms of the early century and the newer countercultural movements that had sprung up in the 1950s and 60s.