Abstract
“Hallucination may be a new revelation of the real world”, Philip Toynbee intimated in January 1947. Toynbee embraced narratives that privileged a “novelty of vision” that could better reflect the “strange hallucinatory angle” of post-war reality. This chapter suggests it was a mode of particular pertinence to the post-war woman writer. Writing became a form of resistance to an indeterminate selfhood, markedly occupying the shorter literary forms that had long been the province of women writers; as Clare Hanson argues, from modernism onwards the short story became “a particularly appropriate vehicle for the expression of the ex-centric, alienated vision of women”. To mark a departure from more commercial endeavours the hallucinatory bloomed into one of the defining features of post-war women’s short stories, in writing that sought the compensations of dream, memory, phantasm, hope and illusion to set out an alternative reality. Placing particular emphasis on the short stories of Elizabeth Bowen and Anna Kavan, this chapter explores the hallucinatory as an emancipatory literary mode.
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Ferris, N. (2021). A Precarious Vision: Hallucination and the Short Story in Post-War Britain. In: Radford, A., Van Hove, H. (eds) British Experimental Women’s Fiction, 1945—1975 . Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72766-6_3
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