The Edinburgh Companion to Place and Space in Interwar Women’s Writing in English

Explores how place, space and everyday life were represented in interwar women’s writing in English.

This Companion considers how ideas of place and space were articulated in prose, poetry and plays by women in the interwar period. By examining the works of canonical and non-canonical Anglophone authors from 1918–1939, it provides a wide-ranging discussion of women’s roles in society and the issues they faced in the time between two devastating global conflicts. In particular, it interrogates the ways in which women writers imagined community and narrated their domestic, local, national and international geographies in fiction, in verse and on the stage. Its twenty-six chapters take a variety of methodological approaches, including archival research, theoretical discussion, close reading and in-depth case studies, and draw on a number of academic fields, spanning across literary history, feminist theory, psychoanalysis and sociology. The contributors’ detailed explorations of interwar modernist literature enable a deeper appreciation of the everyday concerns of women in the aftermath of one world war and the years leading up to the next, especially what they thought about gender, borders, migration and the concept of ‘home’.