Elizabeth Bowen: New Critical Perspectives - Hardcover

Osborn, Susan

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1859184359 ISBN 13: 9781859184356

Publisher: Cork University Press, 2009

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author:

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

Review:

"Good literature reflects its era. Elizabeth Bowen: New Critical Perspectives discusses the work of Elizabeth Bowen, who many literary critics now discuss and rate highly, among other twentieth century literary great Samuel Beckett. Discussing her work in novels, stories, sensationalism, and on the concepts of modernity in the tumultuous twentieth century, is crafted by many modern literary critics and presents a scholarly and very highly recommended addition for community and college literary studies collections." (Midwest Book Review)

"Focusing on various aspects of the often-discomfiting "strangeness" of Bowen's writing, Osborn and her contributors elaborate new directions in Bowen criticism pioneers by the deconstructive and neo-Freudian psychoanalytic approaches of Andrew Bennette and Nicholas Rolye, Maud Ellmann and Neil Corcoran. Summing Up: Recommended." (Choice)

"Essays on the Anglo-Irish novelist and short-story writer (1899-1973); topics include her affinities with Beckett." (The Chronicle of Higher Education)

About this edition

• Publisher: Cork University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1859184359
• ISBN 13: 9781859184356
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256