Anna Kavan on ice : an encounter with Anna Kavan’s wartime writing via New Zealand and the Arctic imaginary

Abstract

My thesis stages a series of encounters with the writer Anna Kavan (1901-1968), and presents archival material, including, as an Appendix, the full text of an extensive interview with Ian Hamilton, who was Kavan's companion/lover for much of the time between 1939 and 1942. The years of the Second World War, 1939-1945, represented for Anna Kavan a period of stylistic experimentation and global voyaging. It was the most prolific time of her writing life, and also the most successful in terms of critical accolades and a wide readership, ensured in part by her role as a contributor to the respected British wartime journal Horizon. In this thesis I suggest, through my own readings, different theoretical, historical and geographical contexts in which Kavan's work of this period can be examined. In particular, I read Kavan alongside other New Zealand writers of the 1940s, such as Greville Texidor, Allen Curnow and Frank Sargeson. I also utilise the differing aesthetic and theoretical perspectives provided by Surrealism, Existentialism, Psychoanalysis and Chaos Theory. The films of Alfred Hitchcock provide further, albeit inevitably more idiosyncratic, lenses through which to view Kavan's work.