Genre Departures is a comparatist study of women writers' responses to National Socialism and World War II. Part One addresses historical and philosophical responses by Rebecca West and Hannah Arendt. Part Two addresses experimental literary responses by Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, and the postwar Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann. Genre Departures examines literary works in a number of genres: poetry and poetic meditation; journalism, travel, and memoir; neo-realist and postmodernist novel; it also crosses disciplines in order to examine writers who themselves crossed disciplines and in some cases national boundaries. Since the texts were first published between 1936 and 1971, they begin with premonitory anticipations of the war and conclude with responses that are distinctly postwar and retrospective. Genre Departures suggests that the ruptures created by the ensuing war produced a seismic shift in the world of these women writers that expressed itself in their intellectual and aesthetic production and that ultimately their efforts constituted a historically-induced experimental movement.