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British Women's Writing, 1930 to 1960: Between the Waves

Online ISBN:
9781800341302
Print ISBN:
9781789621822
Publisher:
Liverpool University Press
Book

British Women's Writing, 1930 to 1960: Between the Waves

Sue Kennedy (ed.),
Sue Kennedy
(ed.)
University of Hull (emeritus)
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Published online:
20 May 2021
Published in print:
31 July 2020
Online ISBN:
9781800341302
Print ISBN:
9781789621822
Publisher:
Liverpool University Press

Abstract

British Women Writers 1930 – 1960: Between the Waves contributes to the vital recuperative work on mid-twentieth century writing by and for women. Fourteen original essays from leading academics and emerging critical voices shed new light on writers commonly dismissed as middlebrow in their concerns and conservative in their styles and politics. The essays showcase the stylistic, cultural and political vitality of the fiction, non-fiction, drama, poetry and journalism of a selection authors including Vera Brittain, Storm Jameson, Nancy Mitford, Phyllis Shand Allfrey, Rumer Godden, Attia Hosain, Doris Lessing, Kamala Markandaya, Susan Ertz, Marghanita Laski, Elizabeth Bowen, Edith Pargeter, Eileen Bigland, Nancy Spain, Vera Laughton Matthews, Pamela Hansford Johnson, Dorothy Whipple, Elizabeth Taylor, Daphne du Maurier, Barbara Comyns, Shelagh Delaney, Stevie Smith and Penelope Mortimer. The neologism ‘interfeminism’, coined to partner Kristin Bluemel’s ‘intermodernism’, locates this group chronologically and ideologically between two ‘waves’ of feminism, whilst forging connections between the political and cultural monoliths which have traditionally overshadowed its members. Drawing attention to the strengths of this ‘out-of-category’ writing, the volume also highlights how intersecting discourses of gender, class and society in the inter- and post- bellum anticipate the bold reassessments of female subjectivity that characterize second and third wave feminism. Exploration of popular women’s magazines of the period, and new archival material, add an innovative dimension to this study of the literature of a volatile and transformative period of British social and cultural history.

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