British Experimental Women’s Fiction, 1945—1975

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.

• Chapter 1: Introduction: (Re)mapping the Post-War British Literary Landscape.- Part I: Conditions of Experiment: Post-war Contexts.- Chapter 2: Feeling “The High-voltage Current of the General Pass”: Experiments in Subjectivity in British Women’s Fiction in the Wake of World War II.- Chapter 3: A Precarious Vision: Hallucination and the Short Story in Post-War Britain.- Chapter 4: Whose Sister? “Convenient Pigeonholes”, Peter Owen and the Publishing of Anna Kavan.- Chapter 5: Contacts, Landings: The Holocaust and Late Modernist Form in Eva Figes and Eva Tucker.- Part II: Belonging Nowhere? Experimental Women Writers Reconsidered.- Chapter 6: No Country for Old Maids? Housing the Mid-Century Fiction of Ivy Compton-Burnett.- Chapter 7. Anna Kavan’s Ice: Postwar Experimentalism and the Fiction of the Anthropocene.- Chapter 8: Sweetly Sings the Donkey and Experimentalism after the Angry Young Men.- Chapter 9: “Designing its Own Shadow”: Tracing Ann Quin’s Reiterative Experimental Processes.- Chapter 10: “Simply as an Instrument”: The Female Characters of Christine Brooke-Rose.- Chapter 11: Brigid Brophy’s In Transit, or the Post-war Novel’s Transition from an “Exhausted” to a “Replenished” Form.- Chapter 12: Experimenting in the Ditch: Buchi Emecheta’s Early Novels of Transformation.- Chapter 13: Afterword