Women's Writing 1945-1960: After the Deluge

by J. Dowson (Editor)

Overview

Women's fiction, poetry, drama and non-fiction represent the complex nexus of continuity and change in the British consciousness following the Second World War. These essays restore the cultural and literary significance of women as readers and writers, examining their various transmutations of international, national and domestic politics. The women-centred writing illuminated in this collection also enhances the tradition-in-process of twentieth-century women's literature. Writers discussed include Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing, Muriel Spark, Agatha Christie and Stevie Smith.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781403913098
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	11/11/2003
Edition description:	2003
Pages:	239
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.03(d)

About the Author

KATHLEEN BELL Senior Lecturer in English, De Montford University, UK JOHN BRANNIGAN College Lecturer in English, University College Dublin JULIA BRIGGS Professor of English Literature, De Montford University, UK ALICE ENTWHISTLE Lecturer, University of the West of England, UK KATE FULBROOK Professor of Literary Studies and Associate Dean, Faculty of Humanities, University of the West of England, UK TAMMY GRIMSHAW In her final year of doctoral studies, School of English, University of Leeds, UK CLARE HANSON Professor of English, Loughborough University, UK MARY JOANNOU Senior Lecturer in English and Women's Studies, Anglia Polytechnic University, UK ELIZABETH MASLEN Senior Research Fellow, Institute of English Studies, University of London LINDEN PEACH Professor of Modern Literature and Head of the School of Humanities, University of Gloucestershire, UK SARAH SCEATS Senior Lecturer, Kingston University, London CLAIRE TYLEE Senior Lecturer, Brunel University, UK DIANA WALLACE Lecturer in English, University of Glamorgan, UK SUSAN WATKINS Senior Lecturer in English Literature, School of Cultural Studies, Leeds Metropolitan University

Table of Contents

Chronology Introduction; J.Dowson PART 1: THE LEGACY OF WAR - CONTINUITY AND CHANGE Legacies of the Past: Postwar Women Looking Forward and Back; E.Maslen Resisting Nostalgia: Elizabeth Bowen's A World of Love; J.Briggs Criminal Desires: Women's Crime Writing in the 1940s and 1950s; L.Peach 'The Same Sky': World War II and British Women's Writing for Stage and Screen; C. Ylee PART 2: THE HOME - RETREAT AND RESTRAINT 'No Home of One's Own': Elizabeth Taylor's At Mrs Lippincote's; J.Brannigan Souls Astray: Belonging and the Idea of Home: Elizabeth Bowen's The Heat of the Day, Betty Miller's On the Side of the Angels and Death of the Nightingale and Muriel Spark's Memento Mori; S.Sceats 'At home everywhere and nowhere': Denise Levertov's 'Domestic' Muse; A.Entwistle PART 3: GENDER, LOVE AND MARRIAGE Nancy Mitford and the Pursuit of Love; M.Joannou Retreating into History? Historical Novels by Women Writers, 1945-60; D.Wallace Writing A Man's World: An Exploration of Three Works by Rosemary Sutcliff, Mary Renault and Cecil Woodham Smith; K.Bell Female Masculinity in Iris Murdoch's Early Fiction; T.Grimshaw PART 4: ACROSS THE THRESHOLD - SPIRITUALITY, COLONISATION AND SUBJECTIVITY The Presentation of the Self in Doris Lessing's Martha Quest; K.Fullbrook 'Going Home': Exile and Nostalgia in the Writing of Doris Lessing; S.Watkins 'The Raw and the Cooked': Barbara Pym and Claude Levi-Strauss; C.Hanson 'There is a sweetness in willing self-surrender'?: Self-loss and Renewal in the Poetry of Elizabeth Jennings, Kathleen Raine and Stevie Smith; J.Dowson Index

Editorial Reviews

'This rich and lively collection adds new layers to our knowledge of twentieth-century writing by women. Exploring the worlds 'behind and beyond the fishnet curtains' of Britain in the 1940s and 50s, the essays remind us of the wealth of literary culture in the period, illuminating the contradictory desires and dreams of women writers in the aftermath of war, their sexual and spiritual longings, the appetite for wild fantasy and for closely scrutinising the everyday, the capacity for nostalgic retreat and for radical visions of the future. ' - Alison Light, Lecturer in English, University College London

From the Publisher