Side-Stepping Normativity in Selected Short Stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner

To this date, no comprehensive study of Sylvia Townsend Warner’s short stories has been undertaken. The few publications that exist have concentrated on individual stories, but have not attempted to link them in terms of either content or form. This study closes a gap by highlighting the way Warner’s stories shift to off-centre positions and by discussing Warner’s highly innovative narrative style that does not conform in any way to conventional modernist or postmodernist standards. The monograph further sets out to outline the way in which Warner constantly challenges the categories we apply to classify our surroundings and analyses how Warner succeeds in creating ‘queer’, that is, non-heteronormative as well as strange and eccentric stories without explicitly opposing the so-called norms of her time. In this, Side-Stepping Normativity joins a vibrant conversation in queer studies which revolves around the question how critics can approach literary texts from a non-antagonistic position. Rather than focussing on the role of the critic, however, the monograph shows that Warner’s texts have long achieved what queer theorists seek to achieve on an analytical level.


Inhalt:
Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

1. Undoing Categories: The British Author Sylvia Townsend Warner

2. Homoerotic Desires
2.1 “The Shirt in Mexico”: Gender Disruption and Ambiguous
Speech
2.2 The “Curious Quality” of “Bruno
2.3 Seeking Meaning in “The Green Torso”
2.4 Desire and Detachment

3. Cross-Species Relationships
3.1 Knowledge and Love in the Introduction to The Cat’s
Cradle-Book
3.2 Decentering the Human in “The Traveller from the West and the Traveller from the East”
3.3 Corporeality and Control in “The Wineshop Cat”
3.4 Shifting the Species Line

4. Incestuous Longings
4.1 Secrets and Sibcest in “A Love Match”
4.2 Mothers and Desires in “At a Monkey’s Breast”
4.3 Expanded Experiences and Material Objects in “A Spirit Rises”
4.4 Indifference to Conventions

5. Avenues of Escape
5.1 “At the Trafalgar Bakery” and Ex-Centric Spaces
5.2 “But at the Stroke of Midnight” and Ex-Centric Modes of Being
5.3 “An Act of Reparation”: An Act of Emancipation
5.4 Eluding Interpellation

6. Vanishing
6.1 Death and Disengagement in “‘Boors Carousing’”
6.2 Failure and Success in “A Work of Art”
6.3 Textural Desires in “A Dressmaker”
6.4 Nonbeing

7. Elfin Indifference: Warner’s Kingdoms of Elfin

8. Coda

Works Cited
Primary Literature
Secondary Literature

Autor:inneninformation:
Rebecca K. Hahn ist wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin am Zentrum für Zentrum für Gender- und Diversitätsforschung (ZGD) der Universität Tübingen.