Papers by Patricia Laurence
Standing on the Palatine, one of the Seven Hills of Rome that looks down upon the Forum and the C... more Standing on the Palatine, one of the Seven Hills of Rome that looks down upon the Forum and the Circus Maximus, Bowen wrote that it taught what "emptiness" can be. "Life has run out completely: it is alone there. Those existences, artificial as fireworks, died out on the forgetful dark." 1 The historical city reflected her emotional state: Rome was in ruins, and her dream of Bowen's Court with its promise to someday shelter her and Ritchie was ended. When Bowen's Court was demolished in 1960, Bowen suffered, hearing people say, "So, we hear you have had to sell your Irish castle." Though Bowen said it was "a clean end," as it was "better gone than having it degraded," the emotional reverberations of the sale haunted her until her death in 1973. 2 Her travel book, A Time in Rome, unearths her love and continuing interest in the city, its myths, monuments, ruins, and sites. She wrote to Ritchie in 1958: I worked intensively at my Rome book. I'm reading a tremendous amount of Roman history, which does fascinate me: one book after another I can't put down […] why I ever read anything but Ancient history, I can't think. I think its slightly abstract quality (due to distance of time) plus the almost utter absence of personality-interest which I like so much. 3
History of Political Economy, Dec 1, 2007
... Page 10. John Maynard Keynes and the Arts 301 ... Gen-erally, critics will demonstrate Keynes... more ... Page 10. John Maynard Keynes and the Arts 301 ... Gen-erally, critics will demonstrate Keynes's commitment to the national arts by citing his projects at the end of his life, but the notion of the enlarge-ment of knowledge was in the air in Bloomsbury and among Cam-bridge ...
American Book Review, Sep 1, 2022
Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Mar 1, 2015
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microf... more translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use.
Journal of Modern Literature, 2012
Allan Hepburn’s new collection of Elizabeth Bowen’s radio broadcasts, speeches and interviews, Li... more Allan Hepburn’s new collection of Elizabeth Bowen’s radio broadcasts, speeches and interviews, Listening In, extends Bowen’s cultural and intellectual range and asserts her role as a public intellectual. Though known mainly as a writer of short stories and novels, Bowen emerges in this collection of her BBC broadcasts (1941–1973) as significantly engaged with the spoken voice, the new media and her times.
Modernism/modernity, 2012
617 down into three types, all of which cover similar ground in terms of their relationship to hi... more 617 down into three types, all of which cover similar ground in terms of their relationship to history and to triumphalist imperialist narratives. The first contrasts native superstition with white rationalism to demonstrate either native foolishness or the limits of Western rationalism. In the second, ghosts mark native problems that white men solve. The third presents white ghosts in imperial settings, to reaffirm both that history is essentially white history and that its ghosts can therefore only be white ghosts. At issue is the status of history as differentially available to colonized and colonizing people: whether those who have been conquered can even be said to have history at all. Likewise, the problem of imperial knowledge—what it fails to know and/or cannot know as well as what it knows beyond what native superstition can know—features as a key element of such stories. When Hay turns his attention to modernism and the ghost story, he notes significant shifts. First, the ghost story builds upon the conservatism of its naturalist mode by articulating “a nostalgic preference for an imagined version of a feudal pre-modernity where class distinctions were properly maintained, history was readable in the landscape, and moral codes of Englishness prevailed” (160). Second, ghosts are liberated from the ghost story and begin to appear everywhere. This shift is in part due to the heightened realism of modernist representation: “when realism no longer offers models of representation that render reality ‘realistically,’ literature turns to other modes, including the ghost story, in order to achieve such ‘realistic’ representation” (160). The reality modernism represents by absorbing ghosts into novelistic representation at large is that of the phantasmagoric, spectralized existence of modernity. Following Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, and Marshall Berman, Hay argues that ghosts manifest in so many modernist texts because modernism demonstrates that the present itself is ghostly. The past does not haunt the present so much as the present is simply non-coincident with itself; the world is so thoroughly spectralized under modernity that life is experienced posthumously, as insubstantial and illusory. Magic realism affords a new take on realism’s “project of historical recovery” by introducing ghosts as figures of belonging and means for forming “identity and collectivity” (226). In this vein, the ghost story has been fully absorbed as an element of realism, bringing with it all its contradictory uses: to commemorate a violent past, to long nostalgically for a different past, to displace, to replace, and to defetishize at the same time as it generates magical effects. Hay’s book offers a lucid and compelling overview of the literary history of the ghost story vis-à-vis other genres since the late eighteenth century. The only absence felt by this reader is of any reference to the cultural context of the nineteenth century, the period in which the ghost story came into its own: the massive popularity of spiritualism and occultism, which drove and was fed by the ghost story, and the inextricable connection between the ghost story and Christmas as established by Charles Dickens. Attention to this aspect of the history of the ghost story might have lent greater specificity to the high-level view of history otherwise organizing the book, and anchored it more firmly in a demonstrably popular mindset rather than restricting its insights to the literary-historical. This is but a quibble, however, and does little to detract from this very fine, erudite contribution to recent work on spectrality and modernity.
Stanford University Press eBooks, Apr 1, 1991
Lily Briscoe's Chinese Eyes traces the romance of Julian Bell, nephew of Virginia Woolf, and ... more Lily Briscoe's Chinese Eyes traces the romance of Julian Bell, nephew of Virginia Woolf, and Ling Shuhua, a writer and painter Bell met while teaching at Wuhan University in China in 1935. Relying on a wide selection of previously unpublished writings, Patricia Laurence places Ling, often referred to as the Chinese Katherine Mansfield, squarely in the Bloomsbury constellation. In doing so, she counters East-West polarities and suggests forms of understanding to inaugurate a new kind of cultural criticism and literary description. Laurence expands her examination of Bell and Ling's relationship into a study of parallel literary communities - Bloomsbury in England and the Crescent Moon group in China. Underscoring their reciprocal influences in the early part of the twentieth century, Laurence presents conversations among well-known British and Chinese writers, artists, and historians, including Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, G. L. Dickinson, Xu Zhimo, E. M. Forster, and Xiao Qian. In addition, Laurence's study includes rarely seen photographs of Julian Bell, Ling, and their associates as well as a reproduction of Ling's scroll commemorating moments in the exchange between Bloomsbury and the Crescent Moon group. While many critics agree that modernism is a movement that crosses national boundaries, literary studies rarely reflect such a view. In this volume Laurence links unpublished letters and documents, cultural artifacts, art, literature, and people in ways that provide illumination from a comparative cultural and aesthetic perspective. In so doing she addresses the geographical and critical imbalances - and thus the architecture of modernist, post-colonial, Bloomsbury, and Asian studies - by placing China in an aesthetic matrix of a developing international modernism.
This chapter presents fragments of Bowen’s life between the death of her husband in 1952 and the ... more This chapter presents fragments of Bowen’s life between the death of her husband in 1952 and the sale of Bowen’s Court in 1959. She lectured extensively in America during this period, traveled to the American Academy in Rome to finish A Time in Rome, completed The World of Love, and traveled around England and Scotland for the British Royal Commission on Capital Punishment. Her conservative political values are discussed as well as her late friendships with the writer and musician, Eddy Sackville-West, and the painter, Derek Hill.
Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Apr 1, 2015
Though the term chinoiserie has historically been applied to the decorative and visual arts, this... more Though the term chinoiserie has historically been applied to the decorative and visual arts, this chapter explores its theoretical and practical extension into literature in a specific conversation among and about three female writers from England and China, Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and Ling Shuhua, presenting a notion of chinoiserie as a valuable aesthetic training of the British visual and reading eye. Woolf, for example, valued the writing of Ling Shuhua-- labeled ‘the Chinese Katherine Mansfield’ in China-- for ‘the charm of the unlikeness’ of her aesthetic perceptions. The Chinese admired the writing of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, translating them into Chinese beginning in the 1920s. This aesthetic reciprocity informs the theoretical and methodological issues in this chapter which weaves the style of ‘chinoiserie,’ feminism and modernism into a cross-cultural ‘conversation.’
Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Dec 1, 2020
Virginia Woolf provides a backbone for important arguments that transform our reading of women’s ... more Virginia Woolf provides a backbone for important arguments that transform our reading of women’s writing during times of rising nationalism and war. In Three Guineas and elsewhere, she creates a new ground for fiction by including what is commonly thought a ‘small’ rather than a ‘large’ subject, and she creates links between domestic and public ‘tyranny’. Woolf challenges the claims of critics who assert that women writers do not engage with or link their fiction to the wider society, the nation and the world. Inspired by Woolf, the Irish authors, Elizabeth Bowen and Mary Lavin, illuminate these ‘small’ shocks and events in the lives of individuals, families, communities and institutions. Bowen provides ‘in-between’ glimpses of war in her wartime stories, Ivy Gripped the Steps while Lavin creates close-ups of ‘small’ scenes of beleaguered widows, loyal wives, enfeebled husbands, independent daughters, and needy clergy in her short stories. The intimate lives revealed in these stories are not ‘outside’ of politics and history and the world but are a part of the historical texture of life. They present a resistance to dominant views and richer definitions of the future of community: the dream work of a nation.
This chapter describes how Bowen lent herself as a writer to spy on neutral Ireland, 1940–1941, a... more This chapter describes how Bowen lent herself as a writer to spy on neutral Ireland, 1940–1941, and wrote 200 reports for the British Ministry of Information that reached the desk of Winston Churchill. Her Reports from Eire, extensively researched here, reveal her to be an independent thinker with divided loyalties to England and Ireland. Bowen becomes a cultural flashpoint in Ireland upon the revelation of her spying in 1990s, revealing much about the culture and politics of her time as well as the country in which she is perceived.
College English, Oct 1, 1995
College English, Oct 1, 1977
Tom Farrell&#x27;s&quot; Literacy, the Basics, and all that Jazz&quot;(College Englis... more Tom Farrell&#x27;s&quot; Literacy, the Basics, and all that Jazz&quot;(College English, January, 1977) leans too heavily on an historical perspective of language development which ignores the psycholinguistic realities of remedial students and of the writing process. However, I ...
Springer eBooks, 2021
This chapter explores Bowen’s metier of flux as she travels from Dublin to Kent after her father’... more This chapter explores Bowen’s metier of flux as she travels from Dublin to Kent after her father’s breakdown when she was seven years old. Though seemingly grounded in prominent ascendancy families and traditions—the “mad” Bowens and the “sane” Colleys, described here—she has early feelings of dislocation. Moving from homes in Chichester to Folkstone to Sandgate to Hythe—she has an itinerant education, develops a stammer, and suffers her mother’s death at the age of 13. The Death of the Heart and her little girl stories give voice to the experience of “mad” little girls like herself with feelings of not being located anywhere.
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Papers by Patricia Laurence
—English Language Notes
"Using a wide range of thinkers from Kierkegaard to Kristeva and Derrida, Laurence demonstrates convincingly that Woolf was the rst modern woman novelist to practice silence in her writing and that, in so doing, she created a new language of the mind . . . and changed the metaphor of silence from one of absence or oppression to one of presence and strength."
—Belles Lettres