'Designing its own shadow' – reading Ann Quin

In response, the thesis provides extended and in depth readings of Quin’s books, short pieces, manuscripts and letters to demonstrate how these by turns overtly experimental, allusive, chaotic and frustrating texts are also carefully crafted, replete with clues and motifs, and in conversation with their time and place. Aware of the need to somewhat ‘introduce’ the writer, my readings draw out and consider locations of resonance and discord between her writing, life and cultural contexts. In addition, engagement with specific sources – from George Eliot to Beckett, Woolf to Sartre, Jane Harrison to William Burroughs, Dostoevsky to Alain Renais – reveals how Quin’s writing responds to, interrogates, encompasses and transcends these. Where relevant, the thesis is also informed and extended by a more theoretical approach. Indeed, my distinctive methodological approach reveals the points at which life, writing, historical context and theory are productively interwoven. Throughout, I argue that while the writing seems anachronistic by being immersed in earlier literature, it is precisely this immersion which energises its resistant rebellion to and ironic interrogation of the dominant ideologies and literary practices of its time. In this, Quin’s is writing both of the shadows and designing its own