Feeling “the high-voltage current of the general pass”: experiments in subjectivity in British women’s fiction in the wake of World War II

Van Hove, H. (2021) Feeling “the high-voltage current of the general pass”: experiments in subjectivity in British women’s fiction in the wake of World War II. In: Radford, A. and Van Hove, H. (eds.) British Experimental Women's Fiction, 1945-1975: Slipping Through the Labels. Palgrave Macmillan: London, pp. 41-60. ISBN 9783030727659 (doi: 10.1007/978-3-030-72766-6_2)

Abstract

This chapter focuses on a selection of formally innovative novels written by British women writers during or immediately following World War II, aiming to contribute to recent work concerned with nuancing accounts of mid-twentieth-century literature. Focusing in particular on the differing ways in which women authors negotiated the tension between the particular and the general in their works, this chapter puts forward a reading of experimental women’s fiction in the wake of the war as a counter example to Cyril Connolly’s assertion in 1947 that “such a thing as avant-garde has ceased to exist”. Drawing on works ranging from Storm Jameson’s The Journal of Mary Hervey Russell (1945), Anna Kavan’s Sleep Has His House (1947/1948) to Stevie Smith’s The Holiday (1949) and Rosamond Lehmann’s The Echoing Grove (1953), it argues that these novels, rather than constituting a morally suspect solipsism as some reviews suggested, are concerned with exploring interrelationships between external forces of society and internal states of mind.

• Item Type: Book Sections
• Status: Published
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Van Hove, Hannah
• Authors: Van Hove, H.
• College/School: College of Arts & Humanities > School of Critical Studies > English Literature
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• ISBN: 9783030727659
• Published Online: 24 August 2021