Overview

This book provides innovative, up-to-date essays about Elizabeth Bowen's fiction. It integrates the latest thinking about her engagement, stances, and knowledge of twentieth-century literary movements. Elizabeth Bowen often remarked that she grew up with the twentieth century. Indeed, her writings are coterminous with the technological, social, and cultural developments of modernity. Her novels and short stories, like her essays, register changes in architecture, visual art, soundscapes, the aesthetics and technique of fiction, attitudes towards sex and greater social freedom for women, and the long repercussions of warfare across the twentieth century. Bowen's writing reflects a deep engagement with other authors, whether they were her antecedents – Jane Austen, Marcel Proust, and D. H. Lawrence, among others – or her contemporaries, such as Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, and Eudora Welty. Her fiction and essays are a barometer of the literary, political, social, and cultural contexts in which she lived and wrote.

Full Product Details

Author:   Allan Hepburn (McGill University, Montréal)
Publisher:   Cambridge University Press
Imprint:   Cambridge University Press
ISBN:  

9781009536004

ISBN 10:   1009536001
Pages:   397
Publication Date:   19 March 2026
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Forthcoming
Availability:   Not yet available, will be POD  
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Table of Contents

Part I. Genres: 1. Short stories Paul Delaney; 2. Theatre Brad Kent; 3. The novel Claire Seiler; 4. Criticism Danielle N. Gilman; 5. Life-writing Emily C. Bloom; Part II. Aesthetics: 6. Style Heather Corbally Bryant; 7. Time Beryl Pong; 8. Modernism Doug Battersby; 9. Visuality Michael Waldron; 10. Architecture Maud Ellmann; 11. Comedy Bryan Radley; Part III. Engagements: 12. Jane Austen Deidre Lynch; 13. Flaubert, Maupassant, Proust Victoria Baena; 14. D. H. Lawrence Eve Patten; 15. Virginia Woolf Jay Dickson; 16. Eudora Welty Anna Teekell; Part IV. Locations: 17. Bowen in Italy Nicola Darwood; 18. Hotels Emma Short; 19. London Matthew Brown; 20. Bowen's Ireland John Greaney; Part V. Stances: 21. Technology James Purdon; 22. War Keelan Harkin; 23. Sexuality Michael G. Cronin; 24. Sound Olivia Colpitts; 25. Crime and punishment Carolyn Ownbey; 26. Cold war Adam Piette; Part VI. Identities: 27. Girls Kelly Sullivan; 28. Women Clara Jones; 29. Lovers Geneviève Brassard; 30. Ghosts Paula Derdiger; 31. Servants Ann Rea; 32. Writers Joseph Rosenberg; Part VII. Reputation: 33. Adaptations Shannon Wells-Lassagne; 34. Legacies Allan Hepburn.

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Author Information

Allan Hepburn, an internationally renowned literary scholar, is the author of many books and articles on twentieth-century British, Irish, and American novels. An authority on the novelist Elizabeth Bowen, he has published four books of her uncollected works: The Bazaar and Other Stories; People, Places, Things; Listening In; and The Weight of a World of Feeling. These books have catalysed interest in Bowen's literary production, and they have appeared alongside collections of her essays and an escalating number of critical studies devoted to her fiction. Hepburn holds the James McGill Chair in Twentieth-Century Literature at McGill University and is a member of the editorial board of the Elizabeth Bowen Review.

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