Anna Kavan

The first critical study of Anna Kavan's experimental fiction This study contradicts earlier critical approaches that have figured Anna Kavan's 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, this book 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, Walker focuses on the ways that Kavan's writing undermines fixed or knowable identity and explores the relationship between reality and fiction. This volume not only brings necessary attention to a neglected writer, but also suggests new taxonomies for reading experimental fiction in the mid-twentieth century. Victoria Walker's research is focused on twentieth-century British women's prose fiction, especially experimental writing.