From the 1940s to the 1960s, Elizabeth Bowen took an active role in spoken media and radio in particular by writing essays for broadcast, improvising interviews on the air and giving public lectures. During her lifetime, she published few of her broadcasts. Listening In brings together a substantial number of her ungathered and unknown works for the first time. Bowen was known as a public intellectual capable of talking on numerous subjects with wit and general insight. Invited to university campuses in the UK and US, she delivered important lectures on language, the 'fear of pleasure', character in fiction, the idea of American homes and other topics. Her first efforts for radio were adaptations of her own short stories and dramatizations of literary subjects. She quickly turned to commentary on culture, such as the beginning of the BBC Third Programme and the atmosphere in postwar Czechoslovakia. She documented her love of cinema in the 1930s and the making of Lawrence of Arabia in the 1960s, and broadcast on Queen Elizabeth II, Katherine Mansfield, Frances Burney and Jane Austen.

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.

Reconstructing Modernism establishes for the first time the centrality of modernist buildings and architectural periodicals to British mid-century literature. Drawing upon a wealth of previously unexplored architectural criticism by British authors, this book reveals how arguments about architecture led to innovations in literature, as well as to redesigns in the concept of modernism itself. While the city has long been a focus of literary modernist studies, architectural modernism has never had its due. Scholars usually characterize architectural modernism as a parallel modernism or even an incompatible modernism to literature. Giving special attention to dystopian classics Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four, this study argues that sustained attention to modern architecture shaped mid-century authors' political and aesthetic commitments. After many writers deemed modernist architects to be agents for communism and other collectivist movements, they squared themselves--and literary modernist detachment and aesthetic autonomy--against the seemingly tyrannical utopianism of modern architecture; literary aesthetic qualities were reclaimed as political qualities. In this way, Reconstructing Modernism redraws the boundaries of literary modernist studies: rather than simply adding to its canon, it argues that the responsibility for defining literary modernism for the mid-century public was shared by an incredible variety of authors--Edwardians, modernists, satirists, and even anti-modernists.

To commemorate the recent centennial of Henry James’s death and to help readers understand the depth and scope of the author’s influence both today and during the previous century, thirty leading Jamesian scholars from twelve different countries and five continents were asked to explore ways in which the notions of ‘heritage’ and ‘transmission’ currently come into play when reading James. The resulting chapters of this volume are divided into three main sections, each focusing on different ways in which James’s legacy is being re-evaluated today—from his influence on key authors, playwrights and film-makers over the past century (Part One), to new discoveries regarding European authors and artists who influenced James (Part Two), to recent approaches more radically re-evaluating James for the twenty-first century, including contemporary poetics, political and sociological dimensions, cognitive science, and queer studies (Part Three). This collection will be of great interest to scholars and general readers of James, and is a useful guide to tracing the writer’s ever-elusive ‘figure in the carpet’ and understanding the power of his continued impact today.

The crossing of borders and frontiers between political states and between languages and cultures continues to inhibit and bedevil the freedom of movement of both ideas and people. This book addresses the issues arising from problems of translation and communication, the understanding of identity in hyphenated cultures, the relationship between landscape and character, and the multiplex topic of gender transition. Literature as a key to identity in borderland situations is explored here, together with analyses of semiotics, narratives of madness and abjection. The volume also examines the contemporary refugee crisis through first-hand “Personal Witness” accounts of migration, and political, ethnic and religious divisions in Kosovo, Greece, Portugal and North America. Another section, gathering together historical and current “Poetry of Exile”, offers poets’ perspectives on identity and tradition in the context of loss, alienation, fear and displacement.

From experiments in language and identity to innovations in the novel, the short story and life narratives, the contributors discuss the way in which Bowen's work straddles, informs and defies the existing definitions of modernist and postmodernist literature which dominate twentieth-century writing.

Elizabeth Bowen: A Literary Life reinvents Bowen as a public intellectual, propagandist, spy, cultural ambassador, journalist, and essayist as well as a writer of fiction. Patricia Laurence counters the popular image of Bowen as a mannered, reserved Anglo-Irish writer and presents her as a bold, independent woman who took risks and made her own rules in life and writing. This biography distinguishes itself from others in the depth of research into the life experiences that fueled Bowen’s writing: her espionage for the British Ministry of Information in neutral Ireland, 1940-1941, and the devoted circle of friends, lovers, intellectuals and writers whom she valued: Isaiah Berlin, William Plomer, Maurice Bowra, Stuart Hampshire, Charles Ritchie, Sean O’Faolain, Virginia Woolf, Rosamond Lehmann, and Eudora Welty, among others. The biography also demonstrates how her feelings of irresolution about national identity and gender roles were dispelled through her writing. Her vivid fiction, often about girls and women, is laced with irony about smooth social surfaces rent by disruptive emotion, the sadness of beleaguered adolescents, the occurrence of cultural dislocation, historical atmosphere, as well as undercurrents of violence in small events, and betrayal and disappointment in romance. Her strong visual imagination—so much a part of the texture of her writing—traces places, scenes, landscapes, and objects that subliminally reveal hidden aspects of her characters. Though her reputation faltered in the 1960s-1970s given her political and social conservatism, now, readers are discovering her passionate and poetic temperament and writing as well as the historical consciousness behind her worldly exterior and writing.

How do our institutions shape us, and how do we shape them? From the late nineteenth-century era of high imperialism to the rise of the British welfare state in the mid-twentieth century, the concept of the institution was interrogated and rethought in literary and intellectual culture. In Institutional Character, Robert Higney investigates the role of the modernist novel in this reevaluation, revealing how for a diverse array of modernist writers, character became an attribute of the institutions of the state, international trade, communication and media, labor, education, public health, the military, law, and beyond. In readings of figures from the works of E. M. Forster, Joseph Conrad, and Virginia Woolf to Mulk Raj Anand, Elizabeth Bowen, and Zadie Smith, Higney presents a new history of character in modernist writing. He simultaneously tracks how writers themselves turned to the techniques of fiction to help secure a place in the postwar institutions of literary culture. In these narratives—addressing imperial administrations, global financial competition, women’s entry into the professions, colonial nationalism, and wartime espionage—we are shown the generative power of institutions in preserving the past, designing the present, and engineering the future, and the constitutive involvement of individuals in collective life.

Explores modernist aesthetics and cultural exchange in Britain, France and beyond Offers cutting-edge explorations of different aspects of artistic exchange between Britain and France, written by experts on both sides of the ChannelProvides original close readings of canonical and marginalised modernist textsOpens up new conceptual paradigms by probing multiple meanings related to 'crossing' and 'channelling' modernismOrganises chapters around three key themes of 'translating', 'fashioning', 'mediating' that intervene in the new modernist studiesDescribed by Katherine Mansfield in 1921 as 'a great cold sword between you and your dear love Adventure', in the early twentieth century the English Channel, or 'La Manche' in French, represented both a political and intellectual barrier between European avant-gardism and British restraint, and a bridge for cultural connection and aesthetic innovation. Organised around key terms 'Translating', 'Fashioning' and 'Mediating', this book presents ten original essays by scholars working on both sides of the Channel. Cross-Channel Modernisms historicises artistic exchangesa ina Britain, France and beyond and proposes a rich conceptual apparatus of 'crossings' and 'channels' through which we can read modernism and understand it as emerging from, and intervening in, an always-already shifting, multivalent,a internationala context.

This book is an anthology focused on Shaw’s efforts, literary and political, that worked toward a modernizing Ireland. Following Declan Kiberd’s Foreword and the editor’s Introduction, the contributing chapters, in their order of appearance, are from President of Ireland Michael D. Higgins, Anthony Roche, David Clare, Elizabeth Mannion, Nelson O’Ceallaigh Ritschel, Aisling Smith, Susanne Colleary, Audrey McNamara, Aileen R. Ruane, Peter Gahan, and Gustavo A. Rodriguez Martin. The essays establish that Shaw’s Irishness was inherent and manifested itself in his work, demonstrating that Ireland was a recurring feature in his considerations. Locating Shaw within the march towards modernizing Ireland furthers the recent efforts to secure Shaw’s place within the Irish spheres of literature and politics.