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ISBN:
9780198186908
Publication Date:
December 2004
Page Count:
218
€ 8.00
Book Description:
Elizabeth Bowen is a writer who is still too little appreciated. Neil
Corcoran presents here a critical study of her novels, short stories,
family history, and essays, and shows that her work both inherits from
the Modernist movement and transforms its experimental traditions.
Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return
explores how she adapts Irish Protestant Gothic as a means of
interpreting Irish experience during the Troubles of the 1920s and the
Second World War, and also as a way of defining the defencelessness of
those enduring the Blitz in wartime London. She employs versions of the
Jamesian child as a way of offering a critique of the treatment of
children in the European novel of adultery, and indeed, implicitly, of
the Jamesian child itself. Corcoran relates the various kinds of return
and reflex in her work-notably the presence of the supernatural, but
also the sense of being haunted by reading-to both the Freudian concept
of the "return of the repressed' and to T. S. Eliot's conception of the
auditory imagination as a 'return to the origin."
Making
greater interpretative use of extra-fictional materials than previous
Bowen critics (notably her wartime reports from neutral Ireland to
Churchill's government and the diaries of her wartime lover, the
Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie), Corcoran reveals how her fiction
merges personal story with public history. Employing a wealth of
original research, his radical new readings propose that Bowen is as
important as Samuel Beckett to twentieth-century literary studies--a
writer who returns us anew to the histories of both her time and ours.