Hansen, Denise Rose;
(2022)
Minor Happenings: The 1960s British Art Novel.
Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).
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Abstract
At the heart of the 1960s London art scene, the loosely connected Paddy Kitchen, Ann Quin, Denis Williams, and Stefan Themerson were writing novels. This thesis seeks to uncover how their positions at the intersection of art and literature inform their approaches to the post-war novel. For although the group comprises a painter, two art school secretaries, and an avant-garde publisher, this relationship remains neglected. I seek to fill that gap by examining how they were influenced by, and deeply engaged with, the art world. Using original archival research and pairing my readings with surveys of relevant artworks, I offer a way of reading these novels that views encounters between writers and artists not only as central to these writers’ lives, but to their fiction. This has implications not just for how and why we should read them, but also for our understanding of crucial developments in 1960s culture more broadly. Finding that a common interest in minor aesthetic strategies, practices, experiences, and events of 1960s art is what defines the British art novel of the decade, this work draws on extant scholarship on minor aesthetics to find the terms for speaking about something as elusive as encounters and occurrences, and their narrative, formal, and stylistic manifestations. For rather than advancing authoritative storylines, these writers are interested in seemingly minor occurrences; impressions, sensations, and moods, tilting the novel form towards the experiential over conventional story. Ultimately, Kitchen, Quin, Williams, and Themerson show that a turn towards the effects and affects of fleeting experiences, open-endedness, disfiguration, and bodily reflexes offers an indispensable set of tactics for keeping on living and making art in a fractured post-war landscape. Rather than ‘realist’ or ‘experimentalist’, this group emerges as distinctly artistic, and as key proponents of what I term the ‘1960s British art novel’.
| Type: | Thesis (Doctoral) |
|---|---|
| Qualification: | Ph.D |
| Title: | Minor Happenings: The 1960s British Art Novel |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © The Author 2021. Original content in this thesis is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) Licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/). Any third-party copyright material present remains the property of its respective owner(s) and is licensed under its existing terms. Access may initially be restricted at the author’s request. |
| UCL classification: | UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of English Lang and Literature UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10156149 |
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