Anna Kavan - by Victoria Walker (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

This first book-length study of Anna Kavan's writing contradicts earlier critical approaches that have figured her writing as sui generis by reading her comparatively alongside her contemporaries, especially Jean Rhys, Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark and Doris Lessing. Taking Kavan's fiction as pivotal to understanding trends of experimentalism that emerged across the middle of the twentieth century, it offers close readings of her distinctive prose including her early Helen Ferguson texts, her writing of asylum incarceration, her wartime stories, and her postwar novels. Observing how her fiction challenges perceived divisions between experimental and realist writing, literary and popular genre and (late) modernist and postwar literatures, it focuses on the ways that Kavan's writing undermines fixed or knowable identity and explores the relationship between reality and fiction. This study not only brings necessary attention to a neglected writer, but also suggests new taxonomies for reading experimental fiction in the mid-twentieth century.

Review Quotes

It is fantastic to see the first monograph on Anna Kavan, and to see how it so convincingly argues for her significance. Walker's reading of Kavan as part of and alongside more familiar elements of mid-century literary culture has the paradoxical and very welcome effect of allowing us to see more fully the disturbing power of her work.--Leigh Wilson, University of Westminster