ROOTLESSNESS IN ELIZABETH BOWEN'S THE DEATH OF THE HEART, AND CHINUA ACHEBE'S ARROW OF GOD: A COMPARATIVE STUDY BETWEEN ANGLO-IRISH AND AFRICAN POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE

Postcolonial literature views the British Empire of the nineteenth century as unique in human history and literary products for it provides writers with different subjects that deal with the idea of how to resurrect the colonized identity even after getting liberation. Postcolonial literature seems to label literature written by people living in countries formerly colonized by other colonized and other colonial powers as British. Such literature and particularly novel, emerged to focus on social, moral, and cultural influences and their interrelation with the impact of English existence upon some countries as Ireland in Europe and Nigeria in Africa. Irish novel shares its genesis with the English novel. When we write of the eighteenth century and use the phrase ' the Irish novel', we are necessarily referring to novel written by authors who, irrespective of birthplace, inhabited both England and Ireland and who thought of themselves as English or possibly both English and Irish. This fact is apparent within hands when we talk about the Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen and her novels that show the obvious effect of her Irish identity upon her works during the period of World Wars I and II with a consideration to Ireland as a British colony. The same impact with African culture, postcolonial Nigeria, when its writers saw the changes crept to their traditions. Their literary products concentrated on questioning their nation how to keep and reserve African identity from alternations. Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian writer tried to reflect his culture in a mirror to readers and challenge them with their own strength and weakness in his novel Arrow of God. His novel tackles these weaknesses of the traditional outlook and senses for change. The research paper tackles the concept of rootlessness in postcolonialism through Anglo-Irish novel The Death of the Heart (1938) of Elizabeth Bowen ,which is tackled in the first section , and postcolonial Nigerian novel Arrow of God (1964) written by Chinua Achebe in the second section. The paper ends with conclusions and works cited.

‘savage warnings and notations’: The Women Charting New Sensory Terrains in the Wake of Intelligence Work

This article explores the extent to which creative work developed by a number of ex-intelligence operatives in the wake of war posited a total recalibration of sensation and the senses at midcentury. It will suggest that intelligence work, as well as the decades of discretion such work entailed, led to the estimation of a bewildering new sensory terrain. Was this a realm that could be, in the subversive potential of its sensory integration, uniquely inhabited by women artists and writers? How did they adapt to its new ‘savage warnings and notations’? 1 It is an argument informed by the considerable scholarship on the modernist and midcentury sensorium and the impact of global conflict on the mind, body, environment and human senses, but lies askant from this in its focus on those emerging from the secretive spaces of the intelligence services. The three voices central to this discussion, Elizabeth Bowen, Christine Brooke-Rose, and Prunella Clough, are rarely considered within the same critical space, and yet all three place sensory intelligibility at the centre of their aesthetic endeavours in the years immediately following their service. Is their work in the wake of war testament to an elusive new form of address or agency for women writers; a ‘wireless voice’ – as Brooke-Rose conceives of it – that is capable of setting revolutionary new terms of encounter and coherence?

The Morass of Morale

The Ministry of Information (MoI) had a robust morale-research apparatus which, more often than not, failed to successfully appeal to the public in high-profile information campaigns. Cecil Day-Lewis, who worked in the Publications division of the MoI during the war, allegorized such failures through his detective fiction; in both Malice in Wonderland and Minute for Murder, he alludes to Ministry campaigns like the “Silent Column Campaign,” which failed to appropriately respond to public criticism elicited from Home Intelligence morale reports. Day-Lewis’s subtle critiques of MoI morale assessment are also mirrored in the wartime work of Elizabeth Bowen, who used her information work in Ireland to encourage the MoI to take on more sympathetic public stances towards the neutral nation during the war. While Bowen attempted to read and translate the desires of the Irish public to English officials, The Heat of the Day likewise emphasizes characters’ struggles in interpreting and mastering the desires of others. In both The Heat of the Day and in her wartime short stories, Bowen returns to early psychographic symbols of ghosts and apparitions to elucidate the precarious position of the public opinion worker during wartime. In this chapter, both Bowen and Day-Lewis remind readers that the desire to manifest interiority as material produces fear and anxiety amongst citizens who feel themselves spied upon and who see psychographics as just another means of control for governments and institutions against its citizens.

Registrations

From the beginning of the Second World War until 1952, the UK maintained a National Register and issued all citizens with identity cards (one of only two times in which this has occurred—the other being during the First World War). The National Registration Identity Card was an intrinsic part of the logic of classification which guided life on the home front and organized individuals into categories of usefulness, vulnerability, and risk. Mirroring the simplistic basis of these categories, the National Registration Identity Card was notable for the paucity of information it contained. Rather than working as an authentic token which served to validate identity in itself, when it came to security, the card only really worked when read alongside the more richly detailed register to which it referred. Cross-checking between card and register and, more importantly, opening conversations which rested upon the potential for cross-checking, thus animated attempts to identity individuals in wartime Britain. In retreating from the radical subjectivity of modernist prose, writers of the period, such as Graham Greene and Elizabeth Bowen, produced characterizations that were as similarly shorn of depth as the categories that the home front pushed individuals into and the cards that identified them. In playing upon the genre of the espionage thriller, The Ministry of Fear (1943) and The Heat of the Day (1948) thus narrate identities that are defined by social position and by plots which confirm individuals as often precisely what they initially appear to be.

Elizabeth Bowen and Eudora Welty: Selected Correspondence

Over her career, Elizabeth Bowen published ten novels, yet she left no comprehensive theory of the novel. This essay draws especially upon ‘Notes on Writing a Novel’ (1945), ‘The Technique of the Novel’ (1953), and ‘Truth and Fiction’ (1956), as well as opinions that Bowen expressed in her weekly book columns for The Tatler, to formulate her key perceptions of, and rules for, writing a novel. Bowen defined her ideas by drawing upon the empirical evidence of novels by Elizabeth Taylor, Olivia Manning, H.E. Bates, Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, and numerous others. She gave particular thought to ‘situation’, by which she means the central problematic or the crux of the story. The situation precedes and fuels plot. The Second World War, Bowen claimed in her essays and reviews, had a decisive influence on heroism and contemporary fiction by heightening its scale and its repertory of situations.

‘We get all sealed up’: An Essay in Five Deaths

In January 1941 Elizabeth Bowen, struggling to complete Bowen's Court, wrote to Virginia Woolf: ‘the last chapter seems to, or ought to re-write retrospectively all the rest of the book’, and also that she felt ‘despair about my own generation … we don't really suffer much but we get all sealed up’. I approach these two remarks as structuring ideas and as connected. Drawing on recent research on the affective dimensions of history, I examine the management of emotion in Bowen's elite class and period, entailing the systematic blockage of conscious suffering and outward displays of feeling. In this frozen war midwinter, she saw that the conclusion of her family history must decisively reject the trajectory of what had gone before. Would this painfully break the ‘seal’ of this last Bowen's tacit acceptance of settler values? The essay is in five episodes, four about a death in or near Bowen's experience, one in her fiction. Each adds a layer to my analysis of these associated questions and their significance.

The Heroic Today: Elizabeth Bowen and the Technique of the Novel

Over her career, Elizabeth Bowen published ten novels, yet she left no comprehensive theory of the novel. This essay draws especially upon ‘Notes on Writing a Novel’ (1945), ‘The Technique of the Novel’ (1953), and ‘Truth and Fiction’ (1956), as well as opinions that Bowen expressed in her weekly book columns for The Tatler, to formulate her key perceptions of, and rules for, writing a novel. Bowen defined her ideas by drawing upon the empirical evidence of novels by Elizabeth Taylor, Olivia Manning, H.E. Bates, Jane Austen, Gustave Flaubert, and numerous others. She gave particular thought to ‘situation’, by which she means the central problematic or the crux of the story. The situation precedes and fuels plot. The Second World War, Bowen claimed in her essays and reviews, had a decisive influence on heroism and contemporary fiction by heightening its scale and its repertory of situations.