Vagabond Fictions: Gender and Experiment in British Women's Writing, 1945-1970 - Paperback

by Carole Sweeney (Author)

Examines British women's experimental writing in historical contexts, 1945-1970

• The first detailed literary history of women's experimental writing in post-war Britain
• Provides a detailed historical overview combined with close critical readings and complemented by an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources
• Considers literature in changing cultural and technological contexts of production through the BBC, the Arts Council, and avant garde publishing houses
• Offers detailed biographical information on each writer based on original archival research carried out in the British Library and at the Harry Ransom Centre at the University of Texas

Filling in a blank spot in the history of twentieth-century women's writing, Carole Sweeney examines the work of five experimental writers, Anna Kavan, Brigid Brophy, Christine Brooke-Rose, Eva Figes and Ann Quin, whose writing has been neglected in accounts of the development of post-1945 British literature. Each of these writers, Sweeney argues, engaged in diverse formal experiments that challenge the critical commonplace suggesting that after the end of aesthetic modernism the mid-century British novel was characterised by a wholesale return to realism. Avoiding any insistence on a straightforward opposition between literary realism and experimentalism, this study draws upon original archival and biographical material and offers close readings of the creative and critical work of these 'vagabond' writers, demonstrating how they wrote against aesthetic and thematic conventions of their times and negotiated (and often repudiated) concepts of 'feminine' writing.

Back Jacket

Note: please change the hyphen to an en-rule in the date range 'In this fascinating and timely volume, Carole Sweeney reminds us how five previously well-known experimental women writers of the mid-twentieth century are more or less neglected today. Via masterful textual analysis of some of their most notable works, together with concise biographical synopses, their personalities, creative endeavours and sheer radicalism are showcased for a new generation of readers to appreciate.' Gerri Kimber, Visiting Professor, University of Northampton Examines British women's experimental writing in historical contexts, 1945-1970 Filling in a blank spot in the history of twentieth-century women's writing, Carole Sweeney examines the work of five experimental writers, Anna Kavan, Brigid Brophy, Christine Brooke-Rose, Eva Figes and Ann Quin, whose writing has been neglected in accounts of the development of post-1945 British literature. Each of these writers, Sweeney argues, engaged in diverse formal experiments that challenge the critical commonplace suggesting that after the end of aesthetic modernism the mid-century British novel was characterised by a wholesale return to realism. Avoiding any insistence on a straightforward opposition between literary realism and experimentalism, this study draws upon original archival and biographical material and offers close readings of the creative and critical work of these 'vagabond' writers, demonstrating how they wrote against aesthetic and thematic conventions of their times and negotiated (and often repudiated) concepts of 'feminine' writing. Carole Sweeney is Reader in Modern Literature at Goldsmiths, University of London. Cover image: Woman working, Hermetic Seal Transformer Company, Garland, Texas (c) DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University, Robert Yarnall Richie Photograph Collection Cover design: [EUP logo] edinburghuniversitypress.com ISBN 978-1-4744-2617-6 Barcode

Author Biography

Carole Sweeney is Reader in Modern Literature at Goldsmiths, Department of English, University of London. She has published extensively on modernism and race, interwar primitivism and on the contemporary novel. She is the author of Fetish to Subject: From Fetish to Subject: Race, Modernism, and Primitivism, 1919-1935 (Praeger, 2004) and Michel Houellebecq and the Literature of Despair (Bloomsbury, 2013).