Fuses historical and psychoanalytic perspectives to offer a provocative and original analysis of Elizabeth Bowen's fictionThe first major analysis of Elizabeth Bowen's fiction to appear since 2004Substantial, in-depth and distinctive interpretation of her novels and short storiesLiterary analysis informed by biographical, cultural and political contextualisationThis book provides a new account of Bowen's fiction that highlights in particular the force and originality of Bowen's virtually psychoanalytic thinking about development, sexuality and gender. Focusing on the relationship between Bowen's work and the socio-political matrix from which it emerges, Coulson presents a pyschoanalytic literary interpretation informed by biographical, cultural and political contextualisation.

Irish women writers have a large following, and their works are attracting large amounts of scholarly and critical attention. Through roughly 75 alphabetically arranged entries written by more than 35 expert contributors, this reference overviews the lives and works of Irish women writers active in a range of genres and periods. Each entry includes a brief biography, a discussion of major works and themes, a survey of the writer's critical reception, and a list of works by and about the author. The volume closes with a selected, general bibliography. Ireland has an especially lively literary tradition, and works by Irish writers have long been recognized as interesting and influential. While male writers have received the bulk of the critical attention given to Irish literature, contemporary women writers are among the most widely read Irish authors. This reference overviews the lives and works of Irish women writers active in a range of periods and genres. Included are roughly 75 alphabetically arranged entries written by more than 35 expert contributors. Among the writers discussed are: ; Elizabeth Bowen ; Mary Dorcey ; Lady Isabella Augusta Gregory ; Anne Hartigan ; Norah Hoult ; Paula Meehan ; Iris Murdoch ; Edna O'Brien ; Katharine Tynan ; Sheila Wingfield ; And many more. Each entry includes a brief biography, a discussion of major works and themes, a review of the writer's critical reception, and a list of works by and about the writer. The volume closes with a selected, general bibliography.

This book provides a new account of Bowen's fiction that highlights in particular the force and originality of Bowen's virtually psychoanalytic thinking about development, sexuality and gender.

Christopher J. Knight’s Penelope Fitzgerald and the Consolation of Fiction is a study of the British author Penelope Fitzgerald (1916 – 2000), attending to her nine novels, especially as viewed through the lens both of "late style" (she published her first novel, The Golden Child, at age sixty) and, in her words, of "consolation, that is, for doubts and fears as well as for naked human loss." As in Shakespeare’s late, religiously inflected, romances, the two concerns coincide; and Fitzgerald’s ostensible comedies are marked by a clear experience of the tragic and the palpable sense of a world that verges on the edge of indifference to human loss. Yet Fitzgerald, her late age pessimism notwithstanding, seeks (with the aid of her own religious understandings), in each of her novels, to wrestle meaning, consolation and even comedy from circumstances not noticeably propitious. Or as she herself memorably spoke of her own "deepest convictions": "I can only say that however close I’ve come, by this time, to nothingness, I have remained true to my deepest convictions—I mean to the courage of those who are born to be defeated, the weaknesses of the strong, and the tragedy of misunderstandings and missed opportunities, which I have done my best to treat as a comedy, for otherwise how can we manage to bear it?" The recipient of Britain’s Booker Prize and America’s National Book Critics Circle Award, Penelope Fitzgerald’s reputation as a novelist, and author more generally, has grown, since her death, significantly, to the point that she is now widely judged one of Britain’s finest writers, comparable in worth to the likes of Jane Austen, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf.

A continuation of Kiell's (emeritus, psychological services, Brooklyn College) two-volume Scarecrow Press edition (1982). The 7,754 listings cover books, articles, and monographs dealing with literary writing from a psychological point of view during 1980-87. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Por

Immensely popular during her lifetime, the Ango-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) has since been treated as a peripheral figure on the literary map. If only in view of her prolific outputten novels, nearly eighty short stories, and a substantial body of non- fictionBowen is a noteworthy novelist. The radical quality of her work, however, renders her an exceptional one. Surfacing in both subject matter and style, her fictions harbor a subversive potential which has hitherto gone unnoticed. Using a wide range of critical theories-from semiotics to psychoanalysis, from narratology to deconstruction-this book presents a radical re-reading of a selection of Bowen's novels from a lesbian feminist perspective. Taking into account both cultural contexts and the author's non-fictional writings, the book's main focus is on configurations of gender and sexuality. Bowen's fiction constitutes an exploration of the unstable and destabilizing effects of sexuality in the interdependent processes of subjectivity and what she herself referred to as so-called reality.

Seventeen essayists study this enigmatic author's works--not in the traditional style in which they were first reviewed, but rather through a range of contemporary interpretations that resituate Barnes in the context of literary theory and feminist revisions of modernism. Paper edition (unseen), $13.95. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This innovative series meets the urgent need for comprehensive new accounts of Irish writing across the centuries which combine readability with critical authority and information with insight. Each volume addresses the whole range of a writer's work in the various genres, setting its vision of the world in biographical context and situating it within the intellectual, cultural and political currents of the age, in Ireland and the wider world. This series will prove indispensable for students and specialists alike. Book jacket.

A study of the experimental novel of the postwar period in Britain that rethinks the resurgence of the literary avant-garde that occurred in these decades and explains its implications for the history of the novel and late modernism more broadly.