{"title":"British Women Writing War","authors":"Katherine R. Cooper","doi":"10.3828/liverpool/9781789621822.003.0011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781789621822.003.0011","url":null,"abstract":"Katherine Cooper reveals how contemporary assessments of gender, war and writing are shaped by preconceptions concerning experience and authority. Storm Jameson’s key war novels are at odds with conventional appraisals of war writing, which has contributed to her undeserved critical neglect. Her challenge to such prescribed gender boundaries has led to a perception of her work as ‘unwieldy’ and unrepresentative. Second and third-wave feminist studies, untrammelled by overriding concerns with gender, authority and experience, have reassessed women writers of the period. Nevertheless, Jameson’s critique of the systems of war through the male viewpoint lends her narratives a certain authority leading to their marginalization in those critical endeavours dedicated to the privileging and recovery of ‘female’ experience through women’s writing. Jameson’s exposé of the limits of insular nationalism has also hampered her full and proper reassessment within the canon of war writing.","PeriodicalId":348231,"journal":{"name":"British Women's Writing, 1930 to 1960","volume":"67 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117112333","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Stevie Smith","authors":"J. Underwood","doi":"10.3828/liverpool/9781789621822.003.0014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/liverpool/9781789621822.003.0014","url":null,"abstract":"James Underwood supplements recent scholarship on the poetry of Stevie Smith by focusing on the problem of personality. One word that has come to be associated with Smith and her work is ‘eccentric’. Whilst certain variations on this word may be intended as praise, the perception of eccentricity has been offered in lieu of actual integration into twentieth-century literary history. The essay opens up Kristin Bluemel’s argument that we require an entirely new category of literary history to properly comprehend the achievement of an intermodernist writer like Smith. Philip Larkin’s intervention in reviewing Smith’s work and later in creating an archive at the University of Hull is assessed alongside her own seizing of the means of production by the performance of her poetry and her personality in the early 1960s, a move which enhanced her poetic reputation at the same time as it played to the reputation she was given.","PeriodicalId":348231,"journal":{"name":"British Women's Writing, 1930 to 1960","volume":"417 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115229361","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Ambivalence of Testimony in Elizabeth Bowen’s","authors":"A. Ashraf","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv1453hxq.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1453hxq.11","url":null,"abstract":"Ana Ashraf’s exploration of Bowen’s novel demonstrates how, in the post-war milieu, ambivalent narratives of testimony and witnessing challenged the ideology of war and the machinery of propaganda. The novel’s metafictional style emphasizes the self-reflexive nature of witness and testimony. Interweaving personal and political spheres in an experimental form that juxtaposes the classic romance plot and the traditional spy novel, The Heat of the Day offers a feminine view of the masculine world of intelligence. In its presentation of the conflict between love and patriotism, the novel’s treatment of treachery appears unstable and unusual. It also highlights the role of literary testimony in challenging the dominant narrative of war. Demonstrating the ‘intermodern’ preoccupation with political commitment during periods of war, the novel exemplifies an ‘interfeminist’ awareness of the notion of ‘women’s time’, the marginalisation of women’s experience of war and the binary division between fact and fiction.","PeriodicalId":348231,"journal":{"name":"British Women's Writing, 1930 to 1960","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127535185","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Barbara Comyns and New Directions in Women’s Writing","authors":"Nick Turner","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv1453hxq.16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1453hxq.16","url":null,"abstract":"Focussing on Barbara Comyns’ first three novels, published between 1947 and 1956, Nick Turner asserts the originality of an undeservedly neglected writer. Comyns anticipates the female gothic and the Second Wave feminist impulse through her oppressed and vulnerable female characters. The essay suggests Comyns’ writing is innovative and challenging in three ways: firstly, for the way her depiction of domestic space, settings and movement, coupled with the notions of marriage, motherhood and family life, contests the status quo; secondly, for the manner in which the novels place the animal world in close proximity to the human world; and thirdly, for the nature of her comedy - black, surreal, anarchic. Demonstrating how Comyns at times engages with impressionist and surrealist art permits a consideration of her writing in the context of a so far minor tradition in British women’s literature and art, exemplified by Leonora Carrington.","PeriodicalId":348231,"journal":{"name":"British Women's Writing, 1930 to 1960","volume":"15 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115412398","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘We Must Feed the Men’:","authors":"Gill Plain","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv1453hxq.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1453hxq.13","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":348231,"journal":{"name":"British Women's Writing, 1930 to 1960","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126963826","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Lower-middle-class Domestic Leisure in Woman’s Weekly, 1930","authors":"Eleanor Reed","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv1453hxq.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1453hxq.6","url":null,"abstract":"Eleanor Reed explores the status of domestic leisure in issues of Woman’s Weekly during 1930 when many middle-class housewives looked to labour-saving technologies to produce status-defining domestic leisure. Woman’s Weekly initiates and reflects the aspirations and anxieties of a readership eager to cement its position in an expanding, diversifying and competitive middle class. The magazine’s lower-middle-class distinctiveness emerges through comparison to Good Housekeeping, a glossy domestic monthly targeting middle-class housewives with larger budgets. Rather than following Pierre Bourdieu and others in portraying lower-middle-class culture as an inauthentic copy of leisure-class culture, this essay argues that Woman’s Weekly contributes to the production of an ideologically distinctive lower-middle-class domestic culture in which its readers can take pride. This culture is problematized however by its suspected source in the magazine’s unknown producers, some of whom were men; a circumstance alluded to in Stevie Smith’s 1936 Novel on Yellow Paper.","PeriodicalId":348231,"journal":{"name":"British Women's Writing, 1930 to 1960","volume":"21 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126946207","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Men of the House:","authors":"L. Hall","doi":"10.2307/j.ctv1453hxq.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1453hxq.14","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":348231,"journal":{"name":"British Women's Writing, 1930 to 1960","volume":"1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129690571","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}