Bringing new insights from genre theory to bear on the work of the jourbanalist and novelist Rebecca West, this study explores how West's use of and combinations of multiple genres (often in single works) was informed and furthered by her subversive feminist goals. analyzes West's sense of genres as dynamic and strategic processes with transgressive political ends rather than as fixed and reified taxonomies, a radical new approach at the time that is now mirrored in much contemporary theory. Surveying her oeuvre from this point of view, the book goes on to examine systematically West's writing from 1911-1941, including her early jourbanalism and criticism, such novels as and her controversial multi-genre epic