Elizabeth Bowen: Theory, Thought and Things, Paperback

Explores Elizabeth Bowen's significant contribution to twentieth-century literary theory

• Provides new avenues for research in Bowen studies in ways that are concerned primarily with Bowen's perception of writing and narrative
• Moves away from perceptions of Bowen's writing tied to existing ideological categories, such as viewing her work through a lens of psychoanalysis, modernism, or Irish or British history and which emphasise Bowen's innovation not as central to our understanding of the changes happening in twentieth-century literature and history, but as instead a point of 'difficulty'
• Recognises Bowen's innovation, experimentation and her impact on her contemporaries and literary descendants

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. The eleven chapters present new scholarship on Bowen's inventiveness and unique writing style and attachment to objects, covering topics such as queer adolescents, housekeeping, female fetishism, habit and new technologies such as the telephone.

About author(s):

Jessica Gildersleeve is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Southern Queensland. She is the author of Christos Tsiolkas: The Utopian Vision (2017), Don't Look Now (2017), and Elizabeth Bowen and the Writing of Trauma: The Ethics of Survival (2014), and editor of Memory and the Wars on Terror: Australian and British Perspectives (with Richard Gehrmann, 2017).

Patricia Juliana Smith is Associate Professor of English at Hofstra University in New York. She is the author of Lesbian Panic: Homoeroticism in Modern British Women's Fiction. She has edited books and published articles on a variety of topics, including literature, popular culture, cinema, opera, religion, modernism and queer studies.