Introduction: (Re)mapping the Post-War British Literary Landscape

This introductory chapter situates post-war experimental fiction by women writers who have remained largely neglected within the British literary landscape, evaluating their body of work in historical, conceptual and critical terms. In doing so, it hopes to offer a new and vibrant take on twentieth-century literary history, refusing the familiar trajectory of aesthetic modernism, late-modernism, social realism (anti-modernism), postmodernism, thereby expanding and complicating assessments of the post-war period. As well as evaluating these literary taxonomies in relation to the fiction of the authors studied in this collection and (re)positioning their writing in literary-historical terms, this introduction contributes to the rethinking and re-evaluating of ideas around gender, experimentalism, race and canonicity in post-war Britain.

ISBN:9783030727659

Publication year:2021