Includes bibliographical references (pages 249-279) and index.
Contents:
Critical Terrains -- Anna Kavan : Glass Girls -- Brigid Brophy : a 'comet in her day' -- Christine Brooke-Rose : 'un écrivain [sic] dite éxperimentale' -- Eva Figes : 'There must be freedom to experiment' -- Ann Quin : Forms forming themselves.
Summary:
"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."--Publisher's website
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.