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

by Rebecca Hahn

Side-Stepping Selected Short Stories by Sylvia Townsend Warner discusses Sylvia Townsend Warner's highly innovative narrative style, which does not conform to conventional modernist or postmodernist standards, and explores how Warner's short stories shift to off-centre positions.Side-Stepping Normativity further outlines 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 strange and peculiar 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, this thesis shows that Warner's texts have long achieved what queer theorists seek to achieve on an analytical level.

Hardcover

Published August 1, 2020

About the author

Rebecca Hahn grew up in Iowa, attended college in Minnesota, and soon afterward moved to New York City, where she worked as an editorial assistant at a children’s book publisher and wrote her first novel, A Creature of Moonlight, on the side. Her fate has since drawn her westward, first to Minneapolis, and then to the San Francisco Bay area, where she currently resides.