Elizabeth Bowen
The Shadow Across the Page
Published on 27. June 2003
Book
Hardback
256 pages
978-0-7486-1702-9 (ISBN)
Description
WINNER of the British Academy's Rose Mary Crawshay Literary Prize This study offers an authoritative introduction to Elizabeth Bowen's works, revealing both their pleasures for the fiction-addict and their fascinations for the literary critic, theorist, and historian. It also provides a lucid introduction - by demonstration - to psychoanalytic modes of reading, and shows how such readings are enriched by an understanding of the writer's life and times. Elizabeth Bowen is one of the finest writers of fiction in English in the twentieth century. She is also one of the strangest. Born in 1899 into the Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy, she saw herself as the same age as her war-torn century. 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 suspenseful - 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; her conflicts and complicities with other Irish, British, and European writers; her negotiations with 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.
Reviews / Votes
Ellmann writes a searching, critical monograph about a novelist whose idiosyncratic work has enjoyed a much more continuous reception ... Scholarly, informative, and pleasurably readable. * Field Day Review * Original writing always invites us to read differently. In this remarkable book Ellmann shows us how to read Elizabeth Bowen - what we might need to know, and what we should be able to hear - without merely placing her. The sheer attentiveness of Ellmann's prose, the wit of her interests and the reach of her words, make this an exemplary study. It reminds us that writers can only rely on critics that are writers themselves." -- Adam Phillips, psychoanalyst In this remarkable book Ellmann shows us how to read Elizabeth Bowen - what we might need to know, and what we should be able to hear - without merely placing her. The sheer attentiveness of Ellmann's prose, the wit of her interests and the reach of her words, make this an exemplary study. It reminds us that writers can only rely on critics that are writers themselves. -- Adam Phillips, psychoanalyst A brilliant summation of Bowen's work, marked by economy and insight, and a command of English prose akin to Bowen's own. -- Anne Barton, Professor of English, Trinity College Cambridge It is an exceptionally fine and well-judged biography not only of Bowen herself but of the Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy in that troubled country between the 1920s and the mid 20th century, and also of wartime London. And it stands out for the subtlety, originality and intelligence of its close readings of Bowen's novels and short stories...a brilliant summation of Bowen's work, marked by economy and insight, and a command of English prose akin to Bowen's own. -- Anne Barton, Professor of English, Trinity College Cambridge. Brilliant, original ... Maud Ellmann's book makes a powerful intervention in the still-shifting reputation of this great writer ... A bold, innovative, challenging study, which should be very influential. -- Hermione Lee The time is right for a full consideration of Bowen's work by a critic of outstanding gifts. Maud Ellmann certainly is this. -- Seamus Deane, Keough Professor of Irish Studies, University of Notre Dame, IndianaMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Edinburgh
United Kingdom
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Dimensions
Height: 246 mm
Width: 157 mm
Thickness: 25 mm
Weight
531 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-7486-1702-9 (9780748617029)
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Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
06/2021
1st Edition
Edinburgh University Press
€31.49
Available for download
Person
Maud Ellmann is Randy L. & Melvin R. Berlin Professor of the Development of the Novel in English at the University of Chicago. Her books include The Poetics of Impersonality: T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, The Hunger Artists: Starving, Writing, and Imprisonment, and Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism. She has also published widely on modern literature and literary theory, feminism, and deconstruction.
Content
Preface; Chronology; Chapter 1: Shadowing Elizabeth Bowen; Chapter 2: Fall: Bowen's Court and The Last September; Chapter 3: Impasse: The Hotel, Friends and Relations, and 'The Shadowy Third'; Chapter 4: Transport: To the North and The House in Paris; Chapter 5: Furniture: The Death of the Heart, The Heat of the Day, and Wartime Stories; Chapter 6: Incubism: A World of Love and The Little Girls; Chapter 7: Folly: Eva Trout; Selected Bibliography; Index.