Elizabeth Bowen: A Reputation In Writing (the Cutting Edge: Lesbian Life And Literature Series)

Immensely popular during her lifetime, the Ango-Irish writer Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) has since been treated as a peripheral figure on the literary map. If only in view of her prolific outputten novels, nearly eighty short stories, and a substantial body of non- fictionBowen is a noteworthy novelist. The radical quality of her work, however, renders her an exceptional one. Surfacing in both subject matter and style, her fictions harbor a subversive potential which has hitherto gone unnoticed. Using a wide range of critical theories-from semiotics to psychoanalysis, from narratology to deconstruction-this book presents a radical re-reading of a selection of Bowen's novels from a lesbian feminist perspective. Taking into account both cultural contexts and the author's non-fictional writings, the book's main focus is on configurations of gender and sexuality. Bowen's fiction constitutes an exploration of the unstable and destabilizing effects of sexuality in the interdependent processes of subjectivity and what she herself referred to as so-called reality. Foreword / Karla Jay -- 1. Introduction: Elizabeth Bowen -- A Story Of Sorts -- 2. Technologies Of Female Adolescence. The Ideological Timespace Of The Last September (1919). The Interpellation Of The Adolescent -- 3. Authoring Sexual Identities. Sexual Position(ing)s. Interpretation, Transference, And Authorial Control -- 4. Histories Of Narrative Desire. The Fictitious Reality Of The Heat Of The Day (1949). The Historical Inscription Of The Self -- 5. The Discourse Of Suspension. Heterosexual Materials. Discourse In Crisis -- 6. Subtexts Of Psychosexuality. The Inscription Of Creation In Eva Trout (1969). (pre)oedipal Love And The Symbolic Mother -- 7. Sexual/textual Transgressions. Scriptural Encodings. The Mother's Tongue And Female Authorship -- 8. From Marginality To Ex-centricity. (post)modernist Identifications. Sexual In/difference. Ex-centric Interpellations. Renée C. Hoogland. Includes Bibliographical References (p. 345-356) And Index. This textual study attempts to subject the works of the Anglo-Irish writer, Elizabeth Bowen, to a poststructuralist re-reading from a lesbian feminist perspective. Hoogland's current research is preoccupied with configurations of lesbian sexuality in novels of "female development" in the 50s.