Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen's fiction from World War II is among the most celebrated of the era. As most readers know, her remarkable collection of wartime short fiction, The Demon Lover and Other Stories, joins war writing with the gothic. This odd conjuncture has produced two dominant modes of reading Bowen's stories: either the immediate historical context of World War II guides interpretation or Bowen's deployment of gothic tropes and imagery invokes a longer tradition of Anglo-Irish gothic fiction, thereby restoring a specifically Irish historical context to these stories. Rather than privilege one form of reading over the other, I suggest that the defining features of Bowen's war gothic -disorderly temporalities, alternating narratives, hauntings -formally mediate between these two historical moments. On my reading, Bowen's stories transfer the anxieties of Anglo-Irish gothic fiction -the erosion of property rights, wealth distribution, and inheritance -to the scene of the People's War. Bowen's gothic fictions, then, treat the war populism of the 1940s and the calls for a more equitable postwar democracy as augurs of the same economic and social disaster that befell the Anglo-Irish landowners. In Bowen's hands, a genre initially suited for a dying settler colonial class is uniquely, if counter-intuitively, appropriate for a bombed imperial metropolis. These gothic stories of unsettled pasts and ghostly returns function as anxious ruminations on the near future, distress signals from the world to come.

Despite Elizabeth Bowen's emergence as a seminal figure in several key areas of contemporary study, much of her fiction is still considered difficult and resistant to interpretation. In large measure, this is because Bowen's past commentators have paid almost exclusive attention to historical and thematic aspects of her fiction, perhaps above all, to her ascribed interest in women's experience as that experience was shaped by early and mid-twentieth-century Irish and English historical crises. Yet critical attention to such concerns has always brushed aside an immitigable fact of Bowen's writing: her notoriously strange style which produces in almost every sentenceeither explicitly or subliminallysome disorientation of sense, some deviation from standard meaning. The focus of this essay, then, is precisely on Bowen's troublesome stylistic practices and their influence on and relation to meaning formation. Although the ideas here presented have degrees of applicability to all of her novels and stories, this essay will be primarily restricted to a discussion of Bowen's as yet under-examined and under-appreciated The Last September (1929).

In autumn 1962, Sylvia Plath considered moving to the west of Ireland after the break-up of her marriage with Ted Hughes. In an attempt to fix it, the couple spent a few days in Cleggan, Connemara, with Irish poet Richard Murphy. They visited Yeats’ Tower in Coole Park, yet Hughes deserted Plath during the trip. This reinforced her idea of “rent[ing] the house in Ireland, where I found my health, if not my happiness, and try to heal by the wild sea there.” Plath finally chose to settle in London, but not in any house: Yeats’s. She saw moving to the house where the poet she had long admired lived as a good omen. Her affinity with Irish literature does not stop here: Plath almost wrote her undergraduate dissertation on James Joyce, and The Bell Jar recalls this experience as the protagonist’s attempt to read Finnegans Wake deepens her mental collapse. Plath’s letters are scattered with positive references towards the Irish. At a time when the Irish community was often scorned, in both the US and UK, she showed a tolerance that was unusual. The fact that she lived in Boston and grew up in Winthrop, Massachusetts, where the Irish community was thriving, influenced her perception of the Irish. This paper’s aim is to highlight the reasons for Plath’s attachment to Ireland. Plath never identified as a “simple” American, but as an American with strong connections to several European countries, including Ireland.

Description

This piece of literary geography examines the relationship between landscape and identity in the works of nine Irish writers who published English language novels between 1929-1946. Focusing upon the distinct lebenswelt experiences and depictions by these Irish writers, an engagement with Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘Historical Poetics’ sets the periodicity of early post- independent and partioned Ireland in rhythm with the distinct senses of place and spaces of culture to which each writer’s works give birth. This book contains four color photographs.

Reviews

“This book offers a highly evocative read for scholars in the entire spectrum of the human sciences. Among its most eager readers in twenty-first century Europe may be those twentieth century emigrants who returned ‘home,’ after many years of longing, to discover dramatically transformed - and often unwelcoming — ‘chronotopes.’ This book could yield an important on lesson potential connections between liminality and creativity.” – Professor Emeritus Anne Buttimer, University College Dublin

This chapter deepens a period of disappointed love, homelessness, serious illness, and continued writing in her life. Having abandoned the fantasy that Bowen’s Court would shelter her and Charles Ritchie, Bowen bought a modest house in Hythe, a return to her childhood landscape, a period in which she finished The Little Girls (1964), “A Nativity Play” with Derek Hill, and Eva Trout (1966). Her work was interrupted with a serious bout of bronchitis and radium treatments for lung cancer, yet she struggled to complete part of her memoir, Pictures and Conversations before her death in 1973. Her memorial in Farahy Church reawakened rifts in Irish society.

This chapter re-orients consideration of realist elements in Bowen’s short stories by framing readings according to a series of ‘recesses.’ The first is as a building feature designed to conceal and display, which frames a discussion of the status of ‘things’ in Bowen’s writing, that is, the objects that deck out her narratives and become a focus for critical interest in her realism. The second is as a cue for the notion of receding, which I use against claims about consistency in narrative voice in Bowen’s work to argue instead that Bowen’s ‘voice’ can be shown increasingly to recede, leaving the subject-position in such doubt as to compel the willing reader to complete the point of view. Finally, ‘recess’ is used in the sense of suspension or adjournment, against claims that the ‘psychological realism’ created by Bowen presents a ‘transtemporal subjectivity,’ to argue that agency in Bowen’s narratives becomes, by virtue of the points raised above, suspended, such that ‘subjectivit...

Children’s Play in Literature: Investigating the Strengths and the Subversions of the Playing Child fits into an analytical vacuum regarding the relevance of play in the cultural and social context. Indeed, in the introduction, Joyce E. Kelley, the editor of the collection, highlights the many ways in which the child’s play manifests itself in real life (lonely/interactive, rule-based/rule-free, active/linguistic, with/without toys and playthings, using/not using toys properly). Despite this large number of possibilities, few scholars have actually studied it; thus, testifying to how the Western world sees play in opposition to the dignified work of adults. Yet play has an undoubted relevance in the socialisation of children: a fact recognized since Plato’s proto-pedagogical philosophy in ancient Greece. For this reason, children’s literature constantly depicts playtime activities in a recurrent and emblematic fashion, aimed at stimulating the adult readers’ sense of nostalgia for a ‘lost childhood’: an idealized stage of life characterised by carefreeness and innocence.

Children’s Play in Literature: Investigating the Strengths and the Subversions of the Playing Child Ed. Joyce E. Kelley. New York, Oxon: Routledge, 2019. 260 pages. £105.00 (hardback).

Cet article propose d’explorer la mise en place d’une dramaturgie de la voix dans cinq nouvelles d’auteures modernistes et de montrer comment l’utilisation presque exclusive du mode discursif de la conversation s’accompagne d’une exposition theâtrale du langage et d’une poetique de l’affect qui font echo a l’analyse de Michael Stephens dans The Dramaturgy of Style: “By making fiction voice-centered, the stress goes away from the representational toward the presentational. It becomes gestual, human voice-activated, and the body is the soul because what you see is what you get.” Il s’agira d’abord de s’interroger sur la facon dont cette dramaturgie de la voix renvoie au statut generique de ces cinq nouvelles, et plus generalement de la fiction breve moderniste. La question du lien possible, mais problematique, entre la notion de “genre” litteraire et celle de “gender” sera ensuite examinee dans le but de mettre en regard le drame de la voix et le drame du moi moderniste au feminin. La...

... Bowen further hints at the possibility that the brand of nationalism signified by the cottage faces potential political failure in visual terms: Dannie Regan's cottage has a “doorway that yearned up the path like an eye socket,” blind like its one-eyed inhabitant who proceeds to ...

This chapter addresses Bowen’s obnoxious adolescents, arguing that she brings together the operations of language and the critical function of affect in questions of meaning and being, and connects what she sees as the figure of the queer adolescent in Bowen (for example, Theodora Thirdman in Friends and Relations) with the equally queer or innovative operations of her writing, with her novels as aesthetic events. It thus posits adolescence as a particular structure of feeling that, in the assemblage of (Bowen’s) novelistic writing, at once mobilizes the stylistic operations of her prose, and that determines the singularity of her writing and its aesthetic effects.