Description:
Bringing new insights from genre theory to bear on the work of the journalist and novelist Rebecca West, this study explores how West's usage and mixing of multiple genres (often in single works) was informed and furthered by her subversive feminist goals.
Rebecca West's Subversive Use of Hybrid Genres analyses 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 systematically examine West's writing from 1911-41, 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.
Brief description: 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.
Review Quotes: "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.