This course will focus on British women writers of the late 1940s and 1950s. In an age that literary histories tend to represent as the time of the ‘angry young men’, how and what did women write, and how did they compete in the postwar literary scene? Do their texts form a ‘counter-canon’ to the male establishment? Which writers and works are still well-known, which have been forgotten or are being rediscovered, and why? Authors will probably include Elizabeth Taylor, Iris Murdoch, Shelagh Delaney, Anna Kavan, Stevie Smith, and others. Next to reading and discussing representative works, we will also enquire into processes of canon-formation and new tools for research in the field of literary authorship and reception studies.
Please buy and read Elizabeth Taylor’s novel At Mrs Lippincote’s before the course begins; I’d also like to recommend watching David Lean’s film Brief Encounter to get a sense of atmosphere.
– Due to the current situation, this course will most likely take the form of weekly Zoom sessions and a Moodle forum.
- Teacher: Ingo Berensmeyer