Reconsidering Elizabeth Bowen’s Shorter Fiction

Reconsidering Elizabeth Bowen’s Shorter Fiction PDF

Author: Heather Levy

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-12-03

Total Pages: 157

ISBN-13: 1793628181

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Reconsidering Elizabeth Bowen’s Shorter Fiction: Dead Reckoning focuses on Elizabeth Bowen's representations of violence against the self and others. Heather Levy examines the complicity of landscape and the implications of mayhem, murder, and suicide in The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen (2006) edited by Angus Wilson and The Bazaar and Other Stories (2008) edited by Alan Hepburn. It introduces five previously unpublished short story fragments and two nearly complete stories from The Elizabeth Bowen Collection at The Harry Ransom Research Center. Levy argues that Bowen's shorter fiction is a quixotic celebration of moral transgression, crime without punishment, and suicide without mourners. Bowen's compassionate response to offenders and violence anticipated the Perpetrator Trauma movement in the United States. Her innovations with the freedom of the short story produced an uncanny narration of violence. This book integrates the entirety of the scholarship on Bowen's short stories in a clear and original manner and offers a synthetic and compelling excavation of Bowen's unpublished short stories.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen PDF

Author: Phyllis Lassner

Publisher: MacMillan Publishing Company

Published: 1991

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13:

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Elizabeth Bowen is recognized as a major twentieth-century British writer. Her novels, stories, and family history, Bowen's Court, chronicle the impact of Anglo-Irish social and political upheaval on the personal lives and relations of her characters. Her novels of manners, such as The Death of the Heart (1938), expose the fragility of a traditional society in their psychological studies of men and women torn between social convention and personal expression. Her celebrated World War II fictions - the novel The Heat of the Day (1949) and stories such as "Mysterious Kor" - dramatize the tenuous psychological controls of people caught in the chaos of war. Bowen's acute analysis of individual and social psychology resonate in the works of such contemporary writers as Anita Brookner and Eudora Welty. In this first comprehensive study of Bowen's short stories, Phyllis Lassner lucidly and concisely examines Bowen's major themes and concerns. Characterized by their immediacy and what they suggest rather than state, the stories in Encounters and The Collected Stories, among others, reveal Bowen's lifelong attention to women's roles. Although closely related to the novels, the stories are distinct in their artistic achievement. In her discussions of such masterworks as "The Disinherited Summer Night" and "The Happy Autumn Fields", Lassner reveals that Bowen's most effective stories are those in which she has subtly inserted wry critiques of the role of traditional social codes in the formation of gender. This much-needed study of the short fiction includes excerpts from Bowen's own statements on writing as well as an excellent sampling of critical approaches to her work.

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen PDF

Author: Lis Christensen

Publisher: Museum Tusculanum Press

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 9788772896243

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A Danish scholar of English and Irish literature, Christensen focuses on the four novels and handful of short stories that Anglo-Irish writer Bowen (1899-1973) published after World War II, which critics have tended to neglect until very recently. Distributed in the US by ISBS. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen

The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen PDF

Author: Elizabeth Bowen

Publisher: National Geographic Books

Published: 2006-08-08

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 1400096561

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Widely known for her much-admired novels, including The Heat of the Day, The House in Paris, and The Death of the Heart, Elizabeth Bowen established herself in the front rank of the century's writers equally through her short fiction. This collection brings together seventy-nine magnificent stories written over the course of four decades. Vividly featuring scenes of bomb-scarred London during the Blitz, frustrated lovers, acutely observed children, and even vengeful ghosts, these stories reinforce Bowen's reputation as an artist whose finely chiseled narratives—rich in imagination, psychological insight, and craft—transcend their time and place.

To the North

To the North PDF

Author: Elizabeth Bowen

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2006-04-11

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 1400096553

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A young woman’s secret love affair leads to a violent and tragic act in one of Elizabeth Bowen’s most acclaimed novels. To the North centers on two young women in 1920s London, the recently widowed Cecilia Summers and her late husband's sister, Emmeline. Drawn to each other in the wake of their loss, the two set up house together and gradually become more entwined than they know. But the comfortable refuge they have made is "a house built on sand"; both realize it cannot last. While Cecilia, capricious and unsure if she can really love anyone, moves reluctantly toward a second marriage, Emmeline, a gentle and independent soul, is surprised to find the calm tenor of her life disturbed for the first time by her attraction to the predatory Mark Linkwater. Bowen’s psychological acuity is on full display in a conclusion that plumbs the depths of this seemingly detached young woman in a single, life-shattering moment.

The House in Paris

The House in Paris PDF

Author: Elizabeth Bowen

Publisher: Anchor

Published: 2019-06-05

Total Pages: 288

ISBN-13: 198489997X

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One of Elizabeth Bowen’s most artful and psychologically acute novels, The House in Paris is a timeless masterpiece of nuance and atmosphere, and represents the very best of Bowen’s celebrated oeuvre. When eleven-year-old Henrietta arrives at the Fishers’ well-appointed house in Paris, she is prepared to spend her day between trains looked after by an old friend of her grandmother’s. Henrietta longs to see a few sights in the foreign city; little does she know what fascinating secrets the Fisher house itself contains. For Henrietta finds that her visit coincides with that of Leopold, an intense child who has come to Paris to be introduced to the mother he has never known. In the course of a single day, the relations between Leopold, Henrietta’s agitated hostess Naomi Fisher, Leopold’ s mysterious mother, his dead father, and the dying matriarch in bed upstairs, come to light slowly and tantalizingly. And when Henrietta leaves the house that evening, it is in possession of the kind of grave knowledge usually reserved only for adults.

Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel

Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel PDF

Author: Andrew Bennett

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Published: 1995

Total Pages: 181

ISBN-13: 9780312120481

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Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel argues that the Anglo-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) is one of the most important, though undervalued, practitioners of the twentieth-century novel in English. This is an innovative study with significant implications for contemporary critical and theoretical writing. The authors contend that Bowen's work calls for a radically new conception of criticism and theory - and of the novel itself. Bowen's ten novels have been viewed as 'society' novels, novels of 'manners', modelled on - but inferior to - the writings of Henry James, E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf. But the fundamental strangeness of Bowen's novels has gone largely unacknowledged.