Elizabeth Bowen
The Shadow Across the Page
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Edinburgh University Press
Published:31st Aug '04
Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back
Winner of the Rose Mary Crawshay Award for 2004Shortlisted for the 2004 British Academy Book PrizeElizabeth Bowen is one of the finest writers of the twentieth century. She is also one of the strangest. In this authoritative introduction to her life and work, 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.Features:*Maud Ellmann is a distinguished critic who writes with great elegance and critical insight.*Provides a lucid demonstration of psychoanalytic modes of reading and an enriched understanding of Bowen's life and times.*Provides original readings of all the main novels and short stories.*Identifies the key motifs associated with Bowen's strange fiction, for example, her preoccupation with houses and furniture.*Suitable background reading not only for those interested in twentieth-century fiction and women's writing, but for the literary critic, theorist and historian.
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, Indiana
- Winner of British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize 2004
ISBN: 9780748617036
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 406g
248 pages