Elizabeth Bowen: New Critical Perspectives »

Susan Osborn is a critic, novelist, and poet who lectures in the Department of English at Rutgers University.

Combining close textual analysis with theoretically informed readings, this group of international scholars explores how Bowen’s disruptive and deeply unconventional narratives encourage us to read her as a one of the most innovative writers of modern fiction, a true progenitor of modernism.

These original and illuminating essays cite and expound the dynamics of Bowen’s fiction’s originality and value. While some essays explore her fictional narratives’ Beckettian affinities, her narratives’ relation to the Gothic, and the multiple ways her work challenges the norms and boundaries of realism, others examines their representation of Sapphic relations, the unexpected ways her work estranges the conventionally conceived dialogic relation of reader and narrative, and the complex relation of the aesthetic and the ethical in her narratives. Others explore her fiction’s unexpected connections to a range of specific historical issues of major consequence during the early and mid-twentieth century including the interrelated questions of sexuality, gender, race, ethnicity, nation and war.

Contributors xi

Introduction Susan Osborn 1

1 Unstable compounds: Bowen's Beckettian affinities Sinéad Mooney 13

2 'How to measure this unaccountable darkness between the trees': the strange relation of style and meaning in The Last September Susan Osborn 34

3 Dead letters and living things: historical ethics in The House in Paris and The Death of the Heart Eluned Summers-Bremner 61

4 Mumbo-jumbo: the haunted world of The Little Girls June Sturrock 83

5 'She-ward bound': Elizabeth Bowen as a sensationalist writer Shannon Wells-Lassagne 96

6 Territory, space, modernity: Elizabeth Bowen's The Demon Lover and Other Stories and wartime London Shafquat Towheed 113

7 Narrative, meaning and agency in The Heat of the Day Brook Miller Luke Elward Tessa Hempel Philip Kollar 132

Notes 149

Bibliography 159

Index 167