British Experimental Women's Fiction, 1945-1975

Slipping Through the Labels
1. Auflage 2021
ISBN: 978-3-030-72765-9
Verlag: Springer International Publishing

Buch, Englisch, 292 Seiten, Format (B × H): 153 mm x 216 mm, Gewicht: 508 g

This book scrutinizes a range of relatively overlooked post-WWII British women writers who sought to demonstrate that narrative prose fiction offered rich possibilities for aesthetic innovation. What unites all the primary authors in this volume is a commitment to challenging the tenets of British mimetic realism as a literary and historical phenomenon. This collection reassesses how British female novelists operated in relation to transnational vanguard networking clusters, debates and tendencies, both political and artistic. The chapters collected in this volume enquire, for example, whether there is something fundamentally different (or politically dissident) about female experimental procedures and perspectives. This book also investigates the processes of canon formation, asking why, in one way or another, these authors have been sidelined or misconstrued by recent scholarship. Ultimately, it seeks to refine a new research archive on mid-century British fiction by female novelistsat least as diverse as recent and longer established work in the domain of modernist studies.

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Hove, Hannah van

Radford, Andrew

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft: Prosa, Erzählung, Roman, Prosaautoren
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Strömungen & Epochen

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Chapter 1: Introduction: (Re)mapping the Post-War British Literary Landscape.- Part I: Conditions of Experiment: Post-war Contexts.- Chapter 2: Feeling “The High-voltage Current of the General Pass”: Experiments in Subjectivity in British Women’s Fiction in the Wake of World War II.- Chapter 3: A Precarious Vision: Hallucination and the Short Story in Post-War Britain.- Chapter 4: Whose Sister? “Convenient Pigeonholes”, Peter Owen and the Publishing of Anna Kavan.- Chapter 5: Contacts, Landings: The Holocaust and Late Modernist Form in Eva Figes and Eva Tucker.- Part II: Belonging Nowhere? Experimental Women Writers Reconsidered.- Chapter 6: No Country for Old Maids? Housing the Mid-Century Fiction of Ivy Compton-Burnett.- Chapter 7. Anna Kavan’s Ice: Postwar Experimentalism and the Fiction of the Anthropocene.- Chapter 8: Sweetly Sings the Donkey and Experimentalism after the Angry Young Men.- Chapter 9: “Designing its Own Shadow”: Tracing Ann Quin’s Reiterative Experimental Processes.- Chapter 10: “Simply as an Instrument”: The Female Characters of Christine Brooke-Rose.- Chapter 11: Brigid Brophy’s In Transit, or the Post-war Novel’s Transition from an “Exhausted” to a “Replenished” Form.- Chapter 12: Experimenting in the Ditch: Buchi Emecheta’s Early Novels of Transformation.- Chapter 13: Afterword

Über Autor(innen)

Andrew Radford is Senior Lecturer in modernist and contemporary Anglo-American Literature at the University of Glasgow, UK. He has published The Occult Imagination in Britain 1875-1947 (2018) and has co-edited two previous collections of essays: Franco-British Cultural Exchanges, 1880-1940: Channel Packets (2012), and Modernist Women Writers and Spirituality: A Piercing Darkness (2017).  

Hannah Van Hove is a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders at the Free University in Brussels, Belgium, where she is conducting a research project on British post-war experimental women's writing. She completed her PhD on the fiction of Anna Kavan, Alexander Trocchi and Ann Quin at the University of Glasgow, UK, in 2017. She is Chair of the Anna Kavan Society and sits on the editorial board of the Journal for Literary and Intermedial Crossings.