Rediscovering Women Writers Of Wartime London

This book shows the war-stricken city through the eyes of five women writers, whose novels vividly portray life in the Blitz. This new appraisal of their work brings to light the way in which they documented the Blitz in their fiction, highlighting the social changes which were taking place, especially in the lives of women, and leading to a fuller understanding of those turbulent times. The book re-evaluates the contribution of these writers to wartime literature, showing how their long-neglected novels focus on the experiences of individual women protagonists perceived in close relation to the menacing forces of war. This title will interest all those seeking to gain further knowledge of 20th-century women's writing, wartime literature, and social history as recorded in fiction.

This book shows the war-stricken city through the eyes of five women writers, whose novels vividly portray life in the Blitz. This new appraisal of their work brings to light the way in which they documented the Blitz in their fiction, highlighting the social changes which were taking place, especially in the lives of women, and leading to a fuller understanding of those turbulent times. The book re-evaluates the contribution of these writers to wartime literature, showing how their long-neglected novels focus on the experiences of individual women protagonists perceived in close relation to the menacing forces of war. This title will interest all those seeking to gain further knowledge of 20th-century women's writing, wartime literature, and social history as recorded in fiction.

In British Women Writers of World War II , Phyllis Lassner offers a challenging analysis of politicized literature in which such British women writers as Virginia Woolf, Elizabeth Bowen, Stevie Smith and Storm Jameson debated the `justness' of World War II. Lassner questions prevailing approaches to women's war writing by exploring the complex range of pacifist and activist literary forms of women who redefined such pieties as patriotism and duty and heroism and victimization.

In works by well-known authors like Rebecca West and Edith Wharton, as well as writers from India, Armenia, Hungary, and the Cameroons, we hear women speaking out on such issues as politics, economic justice, and social reform."--BOOK JACKET.

Publisher Description

The central aim of this interdisciplinary book is to make visible the intentionality behind the 'forgetting' of European women's contributions during the period between the two world wars in the context of politics, culture and society. It also seeks to record and analyse women's agency in the construction and reconstruction of Europe and its nation states after the First World War, and thus to articulate ways in which the writing of women's history necessarily entails the rewriting of everyone's history. By showing that the erasure of women's texts from literary and cultural history was not accidental but was ideologically motivated, the essays explicitly and implicitly contribute to debates surrounding canon formation. Other important topics are women's political activism during the period, antifascism, the contributions made by female journalists, the politics of literary production, genre, women's relationship with and contributions to the avant-garde, women's professional lives, and women's involvement in voluntary associations. In bringing together the work of scholars whose fields of expertise are diverse but whose interests converge on the inter-war period, the volume invites readers to make connections and comparisons across the whole spectrum of women's political, social, and cultural activities throughout Europe.

In Political and Social Issues in British Women's Fiction, 1928-1968 , Elizabeth Maslen reassesses fiction written by women between the granting of universal franchise and the advent of new-wave feminism. Through close readings of a wide range of novels, Maslen analyses how writers chose to represent such issues as pacifism and the threat of fascism, war, race and class, and gender, exploring in the process how the writers' priorities affect their decisions on how to write.

This is a collection of essays on aspects of British women's lives in the period 1914-1945. Concentrating on women's activities in many different areas ranging from teacher training colleges to women's institutes; the BBC artiste's group to political militancy. "This Working Day World" presents a women's cultural history that is a kaleidoscope of sub- cultures, covering art, fiction, medicine, political racialism and the personal lives of women.