Author: A. Bennett Publisher: Springer ISBN: 0230374352 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 201
Book Description
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, practitioner 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.
Author: Rose Macaulay Publisher: ISBN: Category : English fiction Languages : en Pages : 328
Book Description
Daisy and Daphne, half-sisters, are staying with a family of English 'intelligentsia' on holiday in the Mediterranean. Daisy - shy, insecure and working-class - conceals her 'shameful' work as an author of 'women's fiction' and a journalist with a popular newspaper. Daphne - attractive, confident and sophisticated - is approved of by all, and she and Raymond, the elder son, fall in love (as does Daisy with him). Back in London, the sisters resume normal life, Daisy visiting her 'common' but loving family and Daphne seeing Raymond, who proposes marriage, and is accepted - on condition the engagement is kept secret, to Raymond's consternation. As tension mounts, the author reveals that Daphne and Daisy are actually different facets of one person, and that Raymond, in accepting the sophisticated Daphne, will have to accept Daisy's lesser qualities as well. Daisy/Daphne feels she cannot afford to divulge her origins or let him and his cultured family meet her brash, 'common' mother, and agonises over this. But her determined mother decides to see her daughter's betrothed for herself, and the truth is out. Raymond rather likes mother, but his beloved's prevarications and duplicity have somewhat cooled his passion; will the engagement triumph, or, if not, who will end it?
Author: M. Joannou Publisher: Springer ISBN: 1137265299 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 206
Book Description
An original mapping of women's writing in the 1940s and 1950s, this book looks at Englishness and national identity in women's writing and includes writing from Scotland, Wales, Ireland the Indian subcontinent and Africa. The authors discussed include Virginia Woolf, Daphne Du Maurier, Doris Lessing and Muriel Spark.
Author: Lis Christensen Publisher: Museum Tusculanum Press ISBN: 9788772896243 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 234
Book Description
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
Author: Patricia Laurence Publisher: Springer Nature ISBN: 3030713601 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 357
Book Description
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.
Author: Christopher Knight Publisher: Taylor & Francis ISBN: 131545100X Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 310
Book Description
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.
Author: David Malcolm Publisher: John Wiley & Sons ISBN: 9781444304787 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 592
Book Description
A Companion to the British and Irish Short Story provides a comprehensive treatment of short fiction writing and chronicles its development in Britain and Ireland from 1880 to the present. Provides a comprehensive treatment of the short story in Britain and Ireland as it developed over the period 1880 to the present Includes essays on topics and genres, as well as on individual texts and authors Comprises chapters on women’s writing, Irish fiction, gay and lesbian writing, and short fiction by immigrants to Britain
Author: Elizabeth Bowen Publisher: Random House ISBN: 0099287749 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 45
Book Description
Eva Trout has a capacity for making trouble, attracting trouble and for spreading trouble around her. This book was the author's last completed novel, first published in 1968.