Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow Across the Page

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GBS_insertPreviewButtonPopup('ISBN:9780748617036);WINNER of the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Literary PrizeThis study reveales both the pleasures offered by Elizabeth Bowen's works to the general reader and the literary critic, theorist and historian.Elizabeth Bowen was one of the finest writers of fiction in English in the twentieth century and one of the strangest. Born in 1899, her historical vision extends from the Irish Troubles of the 1920s to the London Blitz and the technological revolution of the post-war years. Her fiction is always entertaining – funny, moving and full of suspense – but it is also profoundly disconcerting.Maud Ellmann teases out Bowen's strangeness through close readings informed by historical, psychoanalytic and deconstructive methods of interpretation. She contextualises Bowen's work in the Irish and modernist traditions to investigate connections between her life and writing. She thoroughly expores Bowen's conflicting and complicit relations with other Irish, British, and European writers, her negotiations between contemporary history and with the long decline of the Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy, her peculiar take on gender and sexuality, her hallucinatory treatment of objects, particularly furniture and telephones and the surprising ways in which her writing pre-empts and in some cases confounds the literary theories brought to bear upon it. Bowen's writing is demonstrated to reach from a Dickensian comprehensiveness to an uncanny premonition of postmodernism.