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Bringing new insights from genre theory to bear on the work of the journalist and novelist Rebecca West, this study explores how West's use of and combinations of multiple genres (often in single works) was informed and furthered by her subversive feminist goals.

Rebecca West's Subversive Use of Hybrid Genres analyzes 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 examine systematically West's writing from 1911-1941, 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. 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. *

Rebecca West's Subversive Use of Hybrid Genres: 1911-41

Acknowledgments



List of Abbreviations



Chapter 1: The Wide Interstices between West's Genres



Chapter 2: 'The Wild Eye of the Artist': Early journalism, Henry James and The Return of the Soldier



Chapter 3: 'The Miraculous Beauty of the Common Lot': New Woman Meets Female Gothic in The Judge



Chapter 4: 'A Mystical Confusion of Substance': Satire and Fantasy Fuse in Rebecca West's Harriet Hume



Chapter 5: Art's 'Blazing Jewel' in The Strange Necessity



Chapter 6: 'The tragic spirit come back into life': West's works of the 1930s: A Letter to a Grandfather, St Augustine, The Thinking Reed, The Harsh Voice



Chapter 7: 'To Cast Away All Acquisitions and Certainties': Black Lamb and Grey Falcon Combines Travel Genres and the Epic



Notes



References



Index