Elizabeth Bowen: New Critical Perspectives

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.