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British author Anna Kavan has long been forgotten by literary criticism. Although her last novel published during her lifetime, Ice (1967), won one of the most prestigious science fiction prizes, the Brian Aldiss award, one can understand Kavan’s displacement from the 1940s and ‘50s literary status quo if we look at Kavan’s statement denying Ice ever was conceived as science fiction: “That’s the way I see the world now”. She in fact referred to her contemporaries as “the New Victorians”. As part of my wider doctoral project, this paper aims to find new critical tools to analyse and discuss Kavan’s fiction, specifically texts concerned with the representation of madness such as Asylum Piece (1940) and Sleep Has His House (1948), in the context of World War II and post-war institutional discourses about gender, madness and politics. By exploring her attempt at experimental writing, I will look at how Kavan’s texts disrupt hegemonic representations of post-war femininity, citizenship and the nation.
Speaker: Laura de la Parra Fernández, Visiting Researcher, Department of English, Harvard University.
Sponsor: RCC.