This book provides a general overview of the life and literary career of the prolific writer Eva Figes, placing her extensive production within the various literary movements that have shaped the last century, and drawing on the main features of her works and the different stages in her production. Having recourse to the tools provided by narratology and using the theoretical background of the disciplines of ethics, Holocaust and trauma studies, together with other related fields such as theories of artistic representation, identity questions concerning Jewishness, contemporary history and philosophy, it carries out a comprehensive analysis of Figes’s main works. The main starting hypothesis explored throughout the book is that an evolution may be traced in the aesthetics employed by Figes throughout her career – from her initial Modernist phase to her more realist position – to depict individual and collective traumas. This development is a result of her need to find a mode of representing various traumatic events that have given shape to her personal and family history and to our recent collective history, from the two World Wars and the Holocaust to the social exclusion suffered by minority groups like women or the Jewish immigrant communities. This evolution will be also approached thematically, as there is a development from her early interest in depicting isolated male traumatised characters to the traumas suffered by women under patriarchal structures, and, then, to the encounter with her own suffering as a Holocaust survivor. The author’s evolution in the topics and narrative techniques employed mirrors the different stages in the individual and collective processes of recovery from traumatic experiences, from the process of acting out to the eventual healing phase. Thus, the conclusions detailed here will be useful not only to make Figes’ work known to a wider audience, but also to gain an insight into the evolution of the literary tendencies of the last few decades in trying to represent some of the most horrible events of the modern age.

This collection brings together a selection of original, research-led essays on more than a dozen avant-garde British writers of the 1960s, revealing this to be a crucial - and crucially overlooked - period of British literary history.

This collection examines the dynamic experimentation of contemporary women writers from North America, Australia, and the UK. Blurring the dichotomies of the popular and the literary, the fictional and the factual, the essays assembled here offer new approaches to reading contemporary women fiction writers' reconfigurations of history.

This volume explores a web of complex relationships between body and mind, discussing the efforts of individuals from a wide variety of backgrounds to define, to achieve, or to reject the “normal”; and, in some cases, to put something else in its place. After considering the problems arising from other people’s perceptions of non-standard bodies, the book turns to gender: is it written “upon the body”, established at birth, determined only by physical traits and distinguished by material things such as clothes; or is it written “within the body”, defined through the subject’s own feelings? It considers what happens when “males” consider themselves “female”, and “females” consider themselves “male”. It concludes with the analysis of four books, by different authors with different sexual orientations. Two of these volumes might be considered “genuine autobiographies”, while the other two are novels which include numerous autobiographical features that reflect the authors’ own thoughts.

This book scrutinizes a range of relatively overlooked post-WWII British women writers who sought to demonstrate that narrative prose fiction offered rich possibilities for aesthetic innovation. What unites all the primary authors in this volume is a commitment to challenging the tenets of British mimetic realism as a literary and historical phenomenon. This collection reassesses how British female novelists operated in relation to transnational vanguard networking clusters, debates and tendencies, both political and artistic. The chapters collected in this volume enquire, for example, whether there is something fundamentally different (or politically dissident) about female experimental procedures and perspectives. This book also investigates the processes of canon formation, asking why, in one way or another, these authors have been sidelined or misconstrued by recent scholarship. Ultimately, it seeks to refine a new research archive on mid-century British fiction by female novelists at least as diverse as recent and longer established work in the domain of modernist studies.

The Experimentalists is a collective biography, capturing the life and times of the British experimental writers of the swinging 1960s. A decade of research, including as-yet unopened archives and interviews with the writers' colleagues, is brought together to produce a comprehensive history of this ill-starred group of renegade writers. Whether the bolshie B.S. Johnson, the globetrotting Ann Quin, the cerebral Christine Brooke-Rose, or the omnipresent Anthony Burgess, these writers each brought their own unique contributions to literature at a time uniquely open to their iconoclastic message. The journey connects historical moments from Bletchley Park, to Paris May '68, to terrorist groups of the 1970s. A tale of love, loss, friendship and a shared vision, this book is a fascinating insight into a bold, provocative and influential group of writers whose collective story has gone untold, until now.

Contemporary Jewish Writing in Britain and Ireland presents a wide range of writers-some at the heart of British culture, others outside the mainstream-who address the issue of Jewish cultural difference in Great Britain and Ireland. Editor Bryan Cheyette has assembled a striking roster of writers whose extraordinary imagination and understanding of Jewish experience in Britain and Ireland have transformed English literature in recent decades. They include established figures like Anita Brookner, Harold Pinter, and George Steiner, as well as such vibrant new voices as Elena Lappin, Jonathan Treitel, and Jonathan Wilson. As Cheyette argues, "the contemporary British-Jewish writers in this volume defy the authority of England and the Anglo-Jewish community. . . . [All] are risk-takers who . . . will eventually help replace narrow national narratives and gendered identities with a broader, more plural, diasporic culture". Bryan Cheyette is a professor of English and drama at Queen Mary and Westfield College, University of London. He is the author of Construction of "the Jew" in English Literature and Society: Racial Representations, 1875-1945.

Using a broad range of archival material from Washington University, St. Louis, the University of Glasgow, and the British Library, Useless Activity: Work, Leisure and British Avant-Garde Fiction, 1960-1975 is the first study to ask why the experimental writing of the 1960s and 1970s appears so fraught with anxiety about its own uselessness, before suggesting that this very anxiety was symptomatic of a unique period in British literary history when traditional notions about literary work – and what 'worked' in terms of literature – were being radically scrutinised and reassessed. The study is divided into five chapters with three of those dedicated to the close analysis of work produced by three writers representative of the 1960s British avant-garde: Eva Figes (1932–2012), B.S. Johnson (1933–1973), and Alexander Trocchi (1925–1984). The book argues that these writers’ preoccupations with concepts related to work, such as leisure, debt, and various forms of neglected labour like housework, allow us to rethink the British avant-garde's relation to realism while posing broader questions about the production and value of post-war literary avant-gardism more generally. Useless Activity proposes that only with an understanding of the British avant-garde’s engagement with the idea of work and its various corollaries can we appreciate these writers' move away from certain forms of literary realism and their contribution to the development of the modern British novel during the mid-twentieth century.

The extraordinary range of responses to Jewish culture and history in the work of these writers will appeal to literary scholars and readers interested in Jewish women's history.

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