Introduction: Ways in to Quin

Summary

It would be progress if we could stop the rhapsodizing of Ann Quin and just read her books without having to defend them. It's hard not to defend them, though. The tweedy male literary world of her generation was not exactly waiting to garland her contribution to literary culture. Few critics gave her books the respect of close reading. It was as if Quin was culturally forbidden to actually possess a coherent literary purpose.

Deborah Levy, ‘Ann Quin and Me’, p. 119

Why Quin, Why Now?

This book claims Ann Quin as an important female experimental writer of the twentieth century, shows how the precarious possibility of her writing is its essential attribute, and demonstrates the lasting significance of her work. Via sustained and in-depth readings, I identify the aesthetics, effects and cultural and literary purposes of Quin's writing to show how the range and risk of her vivid and energetic prose – at once deeply personal and wildly experimental – still stirs and startles the reader today.

I open here with Levy's appreciation of Quin in order to position the work of this book, and this introductory chapter in particular, alongside her concerns. Similarly, in What Ever Happened to Modernism? Gabriel Josipovici claimed it was high time to reconsider the story of twentieth-century British fiction. He lamented the critical neglect of fiction ‘genuinely’ interested in experiment and called for the inclusion of a ‘whole web of stories’; ‘to restore a sense of history being made’. In this way, the story of British writing in the twentieth century could expand to include ‘the blind alleys’ rather than only the ‘achieved successes’. Recent years have seen such critical reconsideration begin to take place, including a resurgence of scholarly work on Quin and her contemporaries which has substantively begun to redress the previous critical ‘neglect’ of post-1945 experimental British writing. In wider reading culture too, the prevalence, appreciation and growing profile of experimental forms in contemporary British and Irish fiction has been marked by, for example, the 2013 inauguration of the Goldsmith's Prize for innovative writing, won that year by Eimear McBride's A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing and more recently by Isabel Waidner's Sterling Karat Gold, and books such as Tom McCarthy's C and Ali Smith's How to Be Both being shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize.