Anna Kavan's Ice and Alan Burns' Europe After the Rain: Repetition With A Difference

Wilson, L.G. 2017. Anna Kavan's Ice and Alan Burns' Europe After the Rain: Repetition With A Difference. Women: A Cultural Review. 28 (4), pp. 327-342. https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2017.1388582

TitleAnna Kavan's Ice and Alan Burns' Europe After the Rain: Repetition With A Difference
TypeJournal article
AuthorsWilson, L.G.
Abstract

While Anna Kavan’s work has been largely ignored by critics, the responses of those who have noticed her have been dominated by two assertions. First, many of those wishing to assert her importance and power have seen her work as sui generis, the result of her isolation from the surrounding literary culture. Second, numerous feminist critics have seen her work as reproducing the worst effects of patriarchal domination. This article, through a reading of Kavan’s final novel, Ice (1967), challenges both of these assessments of Kavan. It suggests that, if we notice and try to account for the similarities between Ice and a novel published two years earlier, Alan Burns’ Europe After the Rain (1965), Kavan’s novel can be read as challenging patriarchal domination through a bold and innovative reworking of the reader’s ‘suspension of disbelief’.

KeywordsAnna Kavan, Ice, Alan Burns, Europe After the Rain, mimesis, feminist criticism, sexual violence, 1960s innovative writing
JournalWomen: A Cultural Review
Journal citation28 (4), pp. 327-342
ISSN1470-1367
Year2017
PublisherTaylor & Francis
Accepted author manuscript
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)https://doi.org/10.1080/09574042.2017.1388582
Publication dates
Published20 Nov 2017

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