Book Description
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.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Neil Corcoran presents here a study of Elizabeth Bowen's 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 T.S. Eliot's conception of the auditory imagination as a 'return to the origin'.

FROM THE CRITICS

Stacey D'Erasmo - The New York Times