The concept of ‘middlebrow’ literature in the twentieth century, which received minimal critical attention from the Leavises onwards, has recently become a site of literary and sociological interest, especially regarding the interwar period. This thesis considers the ways in which a corporate middlebrow identity, amongst an intangible community of like-minded readers, was affected by a popularity of the fantastic in the 1920s and 1930s. This subgenre, which I term the ‘domestic fantastic’ (in which one or more elements of the fantastic intrude into an otherwise normalised domestic world) allowed middlebrow authors and readers to focalise and interrogate anxieties affecting the status of the home and its inhabitants which were otherwise either too taboo or, conversely, too well-worn for a traditional, non-fantastic examination. This fantastic vogue was largely initiated by the success of David Garnett’s metamorphosis novel Lady Into Fox (1922), which prepared the way for the other novels discussed in this thesis, predominantly Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Lolly Willowes (1926), Elinor Wylie’s The Venetian Glass Nephew (1926), Ronald Fraser’s Flower Phantoms (1926), Edith Olivier’s The Love-Child (1927), John Collier’s His Monkey Wife (1930) and Green Thoughts (1932), and Frank Baker’s Miss Hargreaves (1940). Through the lenses of metamorphosis, creation, and witchcraft, these novels respond to and reformulate contemporary debates concerning sexuality in marriage, childlessness, and autonomous space for unmarried women. The ‘middlebrow fantasy’ of the stable, idealised home was being revealed as untenable, and the fantastic responded. During the interwar years, when assessments of British society were being widely recalibrated, the domestic fantastic was a subgenre which produced a select but significant range of novels which (whether playful or poignant, hopeful or tragic, nostalgic or progressive) provided the means for both author and reader to interrogate and comment upon the most pervading middle-class social anxieties, in unusual and revitalising ways.

In this dissertation I attempt an evaluation of Barbara Pym as a feminist writer. I study the central protagonists in Pym's twelve novels in the context of British society in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. I have drawn on feminist critical paradigms in my reading of Pym's novels in order to highlight my insights into her women characters. Chapter One examines Pym 's use of comedy and subversion in relation to her main protagonists. Chapter Two explores the 'Excellent Woman' figure in Pym's fiction and the issue of spinsterhood. Chapter Three scrutinises Pym's use of satire and tragedy in relation to her heroines. Chapter Four investigates the emergence of the 'fallen' and 'formidable' women figures in Pym's novels, and analyses the ageing spinster figure. My conclusion is that Barbara Pym is a humanist feminist of some importance, who succeeds in illuminating her heroines' struggles against patriarchy in the context of a changing British society. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

In this dissertation I attempt an evaluation of Barbara Pym as a feminist writer. I study the central protagonists in Pym's twelve novels in the context of British society in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. I have drawn on feminist critical paradigms in my reading of Pym's novels in order to highlight my insights into her women characters. Chapter One examines Pym 's use of comedy and subversion in relation to her main protagonists. Chapter Two explores the 'Excellent Woman' figure in Pym's fiction and the issue of spinsterhood. Chapter Three scrutinises Pym's use of satire and tragedy in relation to her heroines. Chapter Four investigates the emergence of the 'fallen' and 'formidable' women figures in Pym's novels, and analyses the ageing spinster figure. My conclusion is that Barbara Pym is a humanist feminist of some importance, who succeeds in illuminating her heroines' struggles against patriarchy in the context of a changing British society. / English Studies / M.A. (English)

My dissertation offers a new look at how women authors used popular genres to negotiate their economic, artistic, and sexual autonomy, as well as their national and imperial identities, in the context of the changes brought by modernity. As medical science and popular media attempted to delineate women’s sexual natures, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Winifred Holtby, Kate O’Brien, and Molly Keane created narratives which challenged not only psychoanalytic proscriptions about the need for sexual satisfaction, but traditional ideas about women’s inherent modesty. They absorbed, revised, and occasionally rejected outright the discourses of sexology in order to advocate a more diffuse sensuality; for these writers, adventure, travel, independence, creativity, and love between women provided satisfactions as rich as those ascribed to normative heterosexuality. I identify a history of queer sexuality in both Irish and English contexts, one which does not conform to emergent lesbian identity while still exceeding the limits of heteronormativity. / text