The Archaeology of Ruin-Time

2020 ◽  
pp. 185-210
Author(s):  
Beryl Pong
Keyword(s):  
Advisory Committee ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Elizabeth Bowen ◽  
Ruin Time ◽  
Visual Landscape

Chapter 7 addresses the peculiar archaeology of the blitzed landscape, when air raids made new ruins out of modern-day infrastructure, even while revealing older ones from London’s Roman past. Theorists have often conceived of the temporality of ruins as a dialectic between pastness and futurity, ending and return, and these tensions pose representational challenges in the wartime present, when ruins from different eras populated the visual landscape. This chapter argues that wartime works responded to this environment by engaging in their own acts of imaginative archaeology, excavating past ruins to find continuity with those of the dislocated present. It reads a wide array of visual and literary texts: from the romantic paintings of the Recording Britain scheme to portraits of bomb damage made by the War Artists’ Advisory Committee, and from the paratactic poetry of H.D. to the hallucinatory short fiction of Elizabeth Bowen.

Drivetime

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lynne Pearce
Keyword(s):  
Problem Solving ◽  
Psychological Research ◽  
Jack Kerouac ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Complex Task ◽  
Elizabeth Bowen ◽  
Road Trip ◽  
War Fiction ◽  
Joan Didion ◽  
Different Types

What sorts of things do we think about when we’re driving – or being driven – in a car? Drivetime seeks to answer this question by drawing upon a rich archive of British and American texts from ‘the motoring century’ (1900-2000), paying particular attention to the way in which the practice of driving shapes and structures our thinking. While recent sociological and psychological research has helped explain how drivers are able to think about ‘other things’ while performing such a complex task, little attention has, as yet, been paid to the form these cognitive and affective journeys take. Pearce uses her close readings of literary texts – ranging from early twentieth-century motoring periodicals, Modernist and inter-war fiction, American ‘road-trip’ classics, and autobiography – in order to model different types of ‘driving-event’ and, by extension, the car’s use as a means of phenomenological encounter, escape from memory, meditation, problem-solving and daydreaming. The textual case-studies include: H.V. Morton and Edwin Muir; Jack Kerouac and Patricia Highsmith; Neil Young and Joan Didion; Elizabeth Bowen and Rosamund Lehmann.

scholarly journals What “A Smile of Fortune” Has To Hide: An Intertextual And Comparative Reconsideration of the Texture and Theme of Conrad’s Tale

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 7-33
Author(s):  
Grażyna Maria Teresa Branny
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Light In August ◽  
Moby Dick ◽  
Textual Evidence ◽  
Point Of Reference

The present article is part of a larger project on Conrad’s less known short fiction, the area of his writing which is largely undervalued, and even deprecated at times. The paper’s aim is to enhance the appreciation of “A Smile of Fortune,” by drawing attention to its “inner texture” as representative of Conrad’s “art of expression,” especially in view of the writer’s own belief in the supremacy of form over content as well as “suggestiveness” over “explicitness” in his fiction. To achieve this aim a New Critical (“close reading”), intertextual and comparative approaches to Conrad’s story have been adopted, involving nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literary texts, i.e., both those preceding and those following the publication of Conrad’s ’Twixt Land and Sea (1912) volume featuring the tale in question. The intertextual reading of “A Smile of Fortune” against Bernard Malamud’s short story “The Magic Barrel,” Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, with Light in August as a point of reference, reveals the workings in Conrad’s story of the modernist device of denegation, which, alongside antithesis and oxymoron, seems to be largely responsible for the tale’s contradictions and ambiguities, which should thus be perceived as the story’s asset rather than flaw. The textual evidence of Conrad’s tale, as well as its comparison with three short stories: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter,” Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and Peter Taylor’s “Venus, Cupid, Folly and Time,” seem to confirm the presence of the implications of the theme of incest in Conrad’s text, heretofore unrecognized in criticism. Overall, the foregoing analysis of “A Smile of Fortune” hopes to account for, if not disentangle, the story’s complex narratological meanderings and seemingly insoluble ambiguities, particularly as regards character and motive, naming Conrad rather than Faulkner the precursor of denegation.

Fiction for the Woman of To-day: The Modern Short Story in Eve

2020 ◽  
pp. 150-168
Author(s):  
Alice Wood
Keyword(s):  
Short Story ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Elizabeth Bowen ◽  
Traditional Values ◽  
Heterosexual Relationships ◽  
Art Exhibitions ◽  
Radclyffe Hall ◽  
New Models ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
Gossip Columns

This chapter explores short fiction published in Eve, later Eve: The Lady’s Pictorial, a magazine directed to ‘the woman of to-day and tomorrow’ in print between 1921-29. This elite English women’s paper was avowedly modern in outlook - debating new social roles for women, new ideas about psychology and sexuality, changing relations between the sexes and modernist aesthetics - at the same time as upholding traditional values such as respect for class hierarchy and marriage within its routine content of society gossip columns, fashion pages, travel writing and reviews of new books, art exhibitions and theatre. This chapter shows how the tension between modernity and convention was also reflected in the magazine’s short stories, which ranged from formulaic and conservative plots to experimental and subversive narratives. It reads stories by familiar and forgotten authors, including Elizabeth Bowen, Joyce Anstruther, Marthe Troly-Curtin and Radclyffe Hall, that, in more or less radical ways, probed new models of femininity and new models for heterosexual relationships.

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