Product details
Biographical note
Laura Cowan is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Maine, USA. She is editor of the Centennial Essay Collection, T. S. Eliot Man and Poet (1988) and a previous Managing Editor and Co-Editor of the National Poetry Foundation journal Paideuma: Studies in American and British Modernist Poetry.This is a masterful study. It is impeccably researched, compellingly written, and persuasively argued […] Cowan has written a work of commanding scholarship.
Bernard Schweizer, Professor of English, Long Island University, USA.
Bringing new insights from genre theory to bear on the work of the journalist and novelist Rebecca West, this study explores how West's use of and combinations of multiple genres (often in single works) was informed and furthered by her subversive feminist goals.
Rebecca West's Subversive Use of Hybrid Genres analyzes West's sense of genres as dynamic and strategic processes with transgressive political ends rather than as fixed and reified taxonomies, a radical new approach at the time that is now mirrored in much contemporary theory. Surveying her oeuvre from this point of view, the book goes on to examine systematically West's writing from 1911-1941, including her early journalism and criticism, such novels as The Return of the Soldier and her controversial multi-genre epic Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.
Acknowledgments
List of Abbreviations
Chapter 1: The Wide Interstices between West’s Genres
Chapter 2: ‘The Wild Eye of the Artist’: Early journalism, Henry James and The Return of the Soldier
Chapter 3: ‘The Miraculous Beauty of the Common Lot’: New Woman Meets Female Gothic in The Judge
Chapter 4: ‘A Mystical Confusion of Substance’: Satire and Fantasy Fuse in Rebecca West’s Harriet Hume
Chapter 5: Art’s ‘Blazing Jewel’ in The Strange Necessity
Chapter 6: ‘The tragic spirit come back into life’: West’s works of the 1930s: A Letter to a Grandfather, St Augustine, The Thinking Reed, The Harsh Voice
Chapter 7: ‘To Cast Away All Acquisitions and Certainties’: Black Lamb and Grey Falcon Combines Travel Genres and the Epic
Notes
References
Index