Synopses & Reviews
Elizabeth Bowen is a writer who is still too little appreciated. Neil Corcoran presents here a critical study of her novels, short stories, family history, and essays, and shows that her work both inherits from the Modernist movement and transforms its experimental traditions.
Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return explores how she adapts Irish Protestant Gothic as a means of interpreting Irish experience during the Troubles of the 1920s and the Second World War, and also as a way of defining the defencelessness of those enduring the Blitz in wartime London. She employs versions of the Jamesian child as a way of offering a critique of the treatment of children in the European novel of adultery, and indeed, implicitly, of the Jamesian child itself. Corcoran relates the various kinds of return and reflex in her work-notably the presence of the supernatural, but also the sense of being haunted by reading-to both the Freudian concept of the "return of the repressed' and to T. S. Eliot's conception of the auditory imagination as a 'return to the origin."
Making greater interpretative use of extra-fictional materials than previous Bowen critics (notably her wartime reports from neutral Ireland to Churchill's government and the diaries of her wartime lover, the Canadian diplomat Charles Ritchie), Corcoran reveals how her fiction merges personal story with public history. Employing a wealth of original research, his radical new readings propose that Bowen is as important as Samuel Beckett to twentieth-century literary studies--a writer who returns us anew to the histories of both her time and ours.
Review
"Insightful.... [Corcoran] is eloquent throughout on two of the strongest strains in Bowen's work: her hauntedness, and what he calls 'the gift or pain or dislocation of living between Ireland and England, of being bilocated.'"--The New York Times Book Review
"Offer[s] an unobstructed view of recurring patterns of thematic, formal, stylistic, and linguistic 'return' in Bowen's work.... Corcoran constructs an impressive interpretation of the revenants, ghosts, and doubles in Bowen's writing as manifestations of the political unconscious in her texts."--Choice
Review
"Insightful. Corcoran is eloquent throughout on two of the strongest strains in Bowens work: her hauntedness, and what he calls the gift or pain or dislocation of living between Ireland and England."--New York Times Book Review
"Corcoran's investigation of largely unplumbed sources, such as Bowen's wartime bulletins to Churchill from Ireland and the diary of her lover Charles Ritchie, are pertinent and illuminating.... Most impresively... Corcoran's use of language is sensuous, nuanced and precise enough to stand comparison with Bowen's own scrupulous verbal intensity."--Lucy Carlyle, Times Literary Supplement
"The breadth and complexity of Professor Corcoran's terms of reference, which also include, most notably, T. S. Eliot and Sigmund Freud, mark this out as a scholarly work aimed primarily at postgraduates and other academics. But this defines rather than limits his achievement, which is to renovate an important landmark in the occasionally barren territory of mid-twentieth century literature."--Contemporary Review
Synopsis
Elizabeth Bowen: The Enforced Return offers an imaginative new reading of the work of a writer still too little known. Neil Corcoran considers the theme of "return" in her work in various senses, examining her treatment of Ireland, children, and war. Relating her work to some significant non-fictional material, he offers a view of her as a writer who returns us anew to the history of her time, and of ours.
Table of Contents
Introduction
1. Ireland
1. The Ghost in the House: 'Bowen's Court' (1942) and 'The Back Drawing-Room' (1926)
2. Discovery of a Lack: 'The Last September' (1928)
3. A Gost of Style: 'A World of Love' (1955)
2. Children
1. Mother and Child: 'The House in Paris' (1935)
2. Motherless Child: 'The Death of the Heart' (1938)
3. Childless Mother: The Disfigurations of 'Eve Trout or Changing Scenes'
3. War
1. Words in the Dark: 'The Demon Lover and Other Stories'
2. War's Stories: 'The Heat of the Day' (1946) and its Contexts