Off Centre.

In a manner rare in literary studies, our interest in the eccentric has its origin in our discussions of one specific contribution to gender studies: Ina Schabert’s massive Englische Literaturgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts: Eine neue Darstellung aus der Sicht der Geschlechterforschung (2006). In it, she establishes for the first time the artistic and aesthetic coherence of a group of authors and their works, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Stevie Smith, Elizabeth von Arnim, and Virginia Woolf among them, who emerge from classic modernism but who also seem to have a place all their own, a place so curiously unclassifiable that they often find themselves in the category of the quirky, the odd, the sui generis, the eccentric (152-171). Their work is characterized not so much by an oppositional (or for that matter: affirmative) attitude to norms but rather by a calculated indifference to them. Their work often features characters who appear “odd”: old maids who stubbornly refuse to submit to the regime of having to be either “tragic” or “comic,” missionaries forgetful of their missions, narrative voices which weave in and out of various topics in a mode of the spoken, the merely incidental, the chatty. And always: texts which seem to refuse taking up a position which can be firmly determined, “fixed” as it were in any one place, summarized.