British Experimental Women’s Fiction, 1945—1975
British Experimental Women’s Fiction, 1945—1975

Author: Andrew Radford

Publisher: Springer Nature

Published: 2021-08-23

Total Pages: 293

ISBN-13: 3030727661

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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 novelists at least as diverse as recent and longer established work in the domain of modernist studies.

The History of British Women's Writing, 1945-1975
The History of British Women's Writing, 1945-1975

Author: Clare Hanson

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2017-09-14

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 1137477369

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This volume reshapes our understanding of British literary culture from 1945-1975 by exploring the richness and diversity of women’s writing of this period. Essays by leading scholars reveal the range and intensity of women writers’ engagement with post-war transformations including the founding of the Welfare State, the gradual liberalization of attitudes to gender and sexuality and the reconfiguration of Britain and the empire in the context of the Cold War. Attending closely to the politics of form, the sixteen essays range across ‘literary’, ‘middlebrow’ and ‘popular’ genres, including espionage thrillers and historical fiction, children’s literature and science fiction, as well as poetry, drama and journalism. They examine issues including realism and experimentalism, education, class and politics, the emergence of ‘second-wave’ feminism, responses to the Holocaust and mass migration and diaspora. The volume offers an exciting reassessment of women’s writing at a time of radical social change and rapid cultural expansion.

A History of English Georgic Writing
A History of English Georgic Writing

Author: Paddy Bullard

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-12-15

Total Pages: 711

ISBN-13: 1009022415

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The interconnected themes of land and labour were a common recourse for English literary writers between the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, and in the twenty-first they have become pressing again in the work of nature writers, environmentalists, poets, novelists and dramatists. Written by a team of sixteen subject specialists, this volume surveys the literature of rural working lives and landscapes written in English between 1500 and the present day, offering a range of scholarly perspectives on the georgic tradition, with insights from literary criticism, historical scholarship, classics, post-colonial studies, rural studies and ecocriticism. Providing an overview of the current scholarship in georgic literature and criticism, this collection argues that the work of people and animals in farming communities, and the land as it is understood through that work, has provided writers in English with one of their most complex and enduring themes.

British Avant-Garde Fiction of the 1960s
British Avant-Garde Fiction of the 1960s

Author: Kaye Mitchell

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2019-01-22

Total Pages: 280

ISBN-13: 1474436218

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This collection brings together a selection of original, research-led essays on more than a dozen avant-garde British writers of the 1960s, revealing this to be a crucial - and crucially overlooked - period of British literary history.

The Post-War Experimental Novel
The Post-War Experimental Novel

Author: Andrew Hodgson

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2019-10-31

Total Pages: 254

ISBN-13: 1350076864

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Delving into how the traumatic experience of the Second World War formed – or perhaps malformed – the post-war experimental novel, this book explores how the symbolic violence of post-war normalization warped societies' perception of reality. Andrew Hodgson explores how the novel was used by authors to attempt to communicate in such a climate, building a memorial space that has been omitted from literatures and societies of the post-war period. Hodgson investigates this space as it is portrayed in experimental modern British and French fiction, considering themes of amnesia, myopia, delusion and dementia. Such themes are constantly referred back to and posit in narrative a motive for the very broken forms these books often take – books in boxes; of spare pages to be shuffled at the reader's will; with holes in pages; missing whole sections of the alphabet; or books written and then entirely scrubbed out in smudged black ink. Covering the works of B. S. Johnson, Ann Quin, Georges Perec, Roland Topor, Raymond Queneau and others, Andrew Hodgson shows that there is method to the madness of experimental fiction and legitimizes the form as a prominent presence within a wider literary and historical movement in European and American avant-garde literatures.

Useless Activity
Useless Activity

Author: Christopher Webb

Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Published: 2022-07-01

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 1800855303

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Using a broad range of archival material from Washington University, St. Louis, the University of Glasgow, and the British Library, Useless Activity: Work, Leisure and British Avant-Garde Fiction, 1960-1975 is the first study to ask why the experimental writing of the 1960s and 1970s appears so fraught with anxiety about its own uselessness, before suggesting that this very anxiety was symptomatic of a unique period in British literary history when traditional notions about literary work – and what 'worked' in terms of literature – were being radically scrutinised and reassessed. The study is divided into five chapters with three of those dedicated to the close analysis of work produced by three writers representative of the 1960s British avant-garde: Eva Figes (1932–2012), B.S. Johnson (1933–1973), and Alexander Trocchi (1925–1984). The book argues that these writers’ preoccupations with concepts related to work, such as leisure, debt, and various forms of neglected labour like housework, allow us to rethink the British avant-garde's relation to realism while posing broader questions about the production and value of post-war literary avant-gardism more generally. Useless Activity proposes that only with an understanding of the British avant-garde’s engagement with the idea of work and its various corollaries can we appreciate these writers' move away from certain forms of literary realism and their contribution to the development of the modern British novel during the mid-twentieth century.

Time, Tide and History
Time, Tide and History

Author: Brigid Rooney

Publisher: Sydney University Press

Published: 2024-06-01

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 1743329679

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Time, Tide and History: Eleanor Dark’s Fiction is the first book-length edited collection of scholarly essays to treat the full span of Eleanor Dark’s fiction, advancing a recent revival of critical and scholarly interest in Dark’s writing. This volume not only establishes a new view of Dark’s fiction as a whole, but also reflects on the ways in which her fiction speaks to our present moment, in the context of a globally fraught, post-pandemic, Anthropocene era. Above all, the revisiting of Dark’s fiction is mandated by a desire to recognise the ways in which it anticipates vital debates in Australian literary and national culture today, about settler colonialism and its legacies, and with regard to the histories, condition and status of Australia’s First Nations people. This volume interweaves varied topical themes, from formal debates about modernism, historical realism and melodrama, to questions about modernity’s time and space, about gender and cultural difference, and about the specifics of built and natural environments. Time, Tide and History intentionally loosens the conventions of literary scholarship by including other kinds of work alongside critical and scholarly readings: a written dialogue between two contemporary historians about Dark’s legacy, and a biographical piece on the life and role of Eleanor Dark’s husband, Eric Payten Dark. Bringing together the interwar fiction’s feminist and modernist dimensions with the historical turn of The Timeless Land trilogy, the essays in Time, Tide and History collectively pursue ethical and political questions while teasing out the distinctive thematic, formal and aesthetic features of Dark’s fiction.

Encyclopedia of British Women’s Writing 1900–1950
Encyclopedia of British Women’s Writing 1900–1950

Author: Ashlie Sponenberg

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2015-12-23

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0230379478

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This study provides a comprehensive and wide-ranging resource which includes information on many previously neglected British women writers (novelists, poets, dramatists, autobiographers) and topics. It provides contextualizing material, with concise introductions to related topics, including organizations, movements, genres and publications.