Beat Generation
The Beat Generation was a literary movement started by a group of authors whose work explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-war era. The bulk of their work was published and popularized throughout the 1950s. The central elements of Beat culture are the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of materialism, explicit portrayals of the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and exploration.
Blank Generation (literary)
Blank Generation fiction is a term applied to a range of American post-punk or transgressive fiction writers of the 1970s and 1980s, first applied by Elizabeth Young and Graham Cavaney in their 1992 study "Shopping in Space: Essays on American 'Blank Generation' Fiction" (Serpent's Tail, UK/US). The name stems from Richard Hell's signature "Blank Generation" album and title track (itself a riff on and dismissive of the Beat Generation)