The Literary Legacy of Rebecca West is the first book to explore the entire corpus of her extraordinary seventy-one year writing career. The general introductory studies of West are outdated and do not take into account her posthumous publications, or her large literary archive of unpublished letters and manuscripts. Previous scholarly books have chopped West up into categories and genres instead of following the evolution of her career.
"The Literary Legacy of Rebecca West" is the first book to explore the entire corpus of her extraordinary seventy-one year writing career. The general introductory studies of West are outdated and do not take into account her posthumous publications, or her large literary archive of unpublished letters and manuscripts. Previous scholarly books have chopped West up into categories and genres instead of following the evolution of her career. Rollyson, author of "Rebecca West: A Saga of the Century," draws on new scholarship and his interviews with West's contemporaries to provide the first organic account of her esthetic and political vision.
From the time that George Bernard Shaw remarked that “Rebecca West could handle a pen as brilliantly as ever I could and much more savagely,” West’s writings and her politics have elicited strong reactions. This collection of her letters—the first ever published—has been culled from the estimated ten thousand she wrote during her long life. The more than two hundred selected letters follow this spirited author, critic, and journalist from her first feminist campaign for women’s suffrage when she was a teenager through her reassessments of the twentieth century written in 1982, in her ninetieth year. The letters, which are presented in full, include correspondence with West’s famous lover H. G. Wells and with Shaw, Virginia Woolf, Emma Goldman, Noel Coward, and many others; offer pronouncements on such contemporary authors as Norman Mailer, Nadine Gordimer, and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.; and provide new insights into her battles against misogyny, fascism, and communism. West deliberately fashions her own biography through this intensely personal correspondence, challenging rival accounts of her groundbreaking professional career, her frustrating love life, and her tormented family relations. Engrossing to read, the collection sheds new light on this important figure and her social and literary milieu.
Almost the entire corpus of West's fiction receives attention in this volume (with the exception of The Thinking Reed, which is in itself a telling fact)."--Jacket.
DigiCat Publishing presents to you this special edition of "The Judge" by Rebecca West. DigiCat Publishing considers every written word to be a legacy of humankind. Every DigiCat book has been carefully reproduced for republishing in a new modern format. The books are available in print, as well as ebooks. DigiCat hopes you will treat this work with the acknowledgment and passion it deserves as a classic of world literature.
Bringing new insights from genre theory to bear on the work of the journalist and novelist Rebecca West, this study explores how West's use of and combinations of multiple genres (often in single works) was informed and furthered by her subversive feminist goals. Rebecca West's Subversive Use of Hybrid Genres analyzes West's sense of genres as dynamic and strategic processes with transgressive political ends rather than as fixed and reified taxonomies, a radical new approach at the time that is now mirrored in much contemporary theory. Surveying her oeuvre from this point of view, the book goes on to examine systematically West's writing from 1911-1941, including her early journalism and criticism, such novels as The Return of the Soldier and her controversial multi-genre epic Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.
After completing his biography of Rebecca West in 1995, Carl Rollyson felt bereft. As his wife said, "Rebecca was such good company." He had already embarked on another biography, but Rebecca kept beckoning him. He felt there was more to say about her politics-a misunderstood part of her repertoire as reporter and novelist. And had he done justice to her enormous sense of fun and humor? He regretted excising the portrait of her he wanted to put at the beginning of his biography. His editor kept cutting away at what he called Rollyson's doorstop of a book. And then after years of waiting, Rollyson received her FBI file. He kept running into Rebecca, so to speak, when he was working on his biographies of Martha Gellhorn and Jill Craigie. Interviews in London often turned up people who had known West as well. Thus piece by piece, Rollyson accumulated what is now another book about Rebecca West. This new collection tells the story of how his biography got written, of what it means to think like a biographer, and why West's vision remains relevant. She is one of the great personalities and writers of the modern age, and one that we are just beginning to comprehend.
