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British Experimental Women’s Fiction, 1945—1975

Slipping Through the Labels

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  • © 2021

Overview

Editors:
  1. Andrew Radford

    1. Department of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

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  2. Hannah Van Hove

    1. Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium

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  • Refines a new research archive on mid-century British fiction by female novelists

  • Reassesses the relation of the authors to each other, to European vanguard movements, and to their myriad socio-economic, scientific and cultural contexts

  • Surveys and weighs recent debates and critical accounts of the 1945-1975 literary culture

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Table of contents (13 chapters)

  1. Front Matter

    Pages i-xi
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  2. Introduction: (Re)Mapping the Post-War British Literary Landscape

    • Andrew Radford, Hannah Van Hove
    Pages 1-37

  4. Belonging Nowhere? Experimental Women Writers Reconsidered

    1. Front Matter

      Pages 125-125
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    2. No Country for Old Maids? Housing Ivy Compton-Burnett’s Mid-Century Fiction

      • Andrew Radford
      Pages 127-151

    3. Anna Kavan’s Ice: Postwar Experimentalism and the Fiction of the Anthropocene

      • Victoria Walker
      Pages 153-172

    4. Shelagh Delaney’s Sweetly Sings the Donkey (1963) and Experimentalism After the Angry Young Men

      • Joseph Darlington
      Pages 173-193

    5. “Designing Its Own Shadow”: Ann Quin’s Reiterative Experimental Processes

      • Nonia Williams
      Pages 195-213

    6. “Simply as an Instrument”: The Female Characters of Christine Brooke-Rose

      • Stephanie Jones
      Pages 215-234

    7. Brigid Brophy’s In Transit, or the Post-war Novel’s Transition from an “Exhausted” to a “Replenished” Form

      • Karen Zouaoui
      Pages 235-255

    8. Experimenting in the Ditch: Buchi Emecheta’s Early Novels of Transformation

      • Elisabeth Bekers
      Pages 257-278

    9. Afterword: I’m a Woman Experimental Writer … Get Me Out of Here!

      • Carole Sweeney
      Pages 279-284

  5. Back Matter

    Pages 285-292
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Keywords

About this book

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.

Editors and Affiliations

  • Department of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow, Glasgow, UK

    Andrew Radford

  • Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Brussels, Belgium

    Hannah Van Hove

About the editors

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.

Bibliographic Information

  • Book Title: British Experimental Women’s Fiction, 1945—1975

  • Book Subtitle: Slipping Through the Labels

  • Editors: Andrew Radford, Hannah Van Hove

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72766-6

  • Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham

  • eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media Studies, Literature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)

  • Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021

  • Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-030-72765-9Published: 24 August 2021

  • Softcover ISBN: 978-3-030-72768-0Published: 25 August 2022

  • eBook ISBN: 978-3-030-72766-6Published: 23 August 2021

  • Edition Number: 1

  • Number of Pages: XI, 292

  • Number of Illustrations: 2 b/w illustrations

  • Topics: Twentieth-Century Literature, Fiction

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