‘How begin to find a shape?’: situating the mid-twentieth century fiction of Anna Kavan, Alexander Trocchi and Ann Quin

This thesis is concerned with situating the works of Anna Kavan (1901-1968), Alexander Trocchi (1925-1984) and Ann Quin (1936-1973) within a discussion of British mid-twentieth century fiction. The relative neglect of these authors in academic criticism may be due to the fact that much British experimental writing has previously been ignored in surveys of this period. This thesis argues that a study of their work warrants a more nuanced understanding of the mid-twentieth century literary landscape than conventional accounts have allowed for. In that sense, it aims to contribute to research undertaken in more recent years which is concerned with revising dominant accounts of this period. The broader framework for the thesis is provided in Chapter 1 which examines past and present accounts and categorizations of mid-twentieth century British fiction. The remaining three chapters then focus on the 1940s work of Kavan, the fiction written during the 1950s by Trocchi and Quin’s novels of the 1960s. As well as contributing to research concerned with overviews of this period, this thesis furthers individual studies of each of the novelists presented here. By drawing on archival material and reading their works in conversation with their time and place, it attempts to understand the ways in which the experimental fiction of these three authors responded to the social, cultural and historical forces at work in Britain between the forties and the sixties. Whilst all three authors started out from a strategy of subjectivity, rooting their experimentation in a turn inwards, their works, as this thesis suggests, can be construed of as political in their concern with drawing attention to the osmotic effects of exteriority on interiority.