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Elizabeth Bowen was a prolific writer; her publishing career spanned five decades and during this time she wrote ten novels, over one hundred short stories and countless reviews and journal articles. While earlier novels are now acknowledged as Modernist texts, her later novels can be read through the lens of postmodernism; they can be considered variously as romantic fiction, marriage novels, war time spy thrillers and psychological drama but, throughout her novels, she consistently questioned notions of identity, sexuality and the loss of innocence. A World of Lost Innocence: The Fiction of Elizabeth Bowen offers a reading of Elizabeth Bowen’s fiction which focuses specifically on this l...
Cinderella’s transformation from a lowly, overlooked servant into a princess who attracts everyone’s gaze has become a powerful trope within many cultures. Inspired by the Cinderella archive of books and collectables at the University of Bedfordshire, the essays in this collection demonstrate how the story remains active in various different societies where social and family relationships are adapting to modern culture. The volume explores the social arenas of dating apps and prom nights, as well as contemporary issues about women’s roles in the home, and gender identity. Cinderella’s cultural translation is seen through the contributors’ international perspectives: from Irish folklore to the Colombian Cenicienta costeña (Cinderella of the coast) and Spanish literary history. Its transdisciplinarity ranges from fashion in Charles Perrault and the Brothers Grimm’s publications to a comparison of Cinderella and Galatea on film, and essays on British authors Nancy Spain, Anne Thackeray Ritchie and Frances Hodgson Burnett.
This collection of essays examines the work of five intermodernist writers. Some were established authors before the First World War and others continued to write after the Second World War, but this book focuses particularly on their writing between 1918 and 1939. Elizabeth von Arnim, Stella Benson, Bradda Field, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Stella Gibbons and Winifred Watson had much in common: they all wrote novels full of comic moments, which often challenged the cultural politics of the interwar period. Drawing on the literary and critical contexts of each novel, the essays here discuss the use of comic structures that enabled the authors to critique the dominant patriarchal structures of their time, and offer an alternative, sometimes subversive, view of the world in which their characters reside. This book contributes to the growing scholarly interest in interwar fiction, focusing principally on novelists who have fallen out of public view. It widens our understanding both of the authors and of the continuing, highly topical debate about interwar women novelists.
Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar Britain looks at the impact of aviation in Britain and beyond through the 1920s and 1930s. This book considers how in this period flying went from a weapon of war to an extensive industry that included civilian air travel, air mail delivery, flying shows and campaigns to create ‘airmindedness’. Essays look at these developments through the work of writers, filmmakers and flyers and examines the airminded modernism that marked this radical period. Its fourteen chapters include studies of texts by Virginia Woolf, George Orwell, Elizabeth Bowen, W.H. Auden, T.H. White and John Masefield; accounts of the annual RAF Display at Hendon and the Schneider Trophy; and the achievements of celebrity flyers such as Amy Johnson. This collection provides a fresh perspective on the interwar period by bringing analysis of aviation and airmindedness to the study of British literature, history, modernism, mobilities and the history of technology and transportation.
Although history records that the British nineteenth century was obsessed with order,conventionality, and conformity, there were many Victorians from all walks of life, across lines of class, race, and gender, who resisted social mores and sometimes the laws themselves, in a variety of ways and to varying degrees. Some expressed dissension through music, art, literature, and social protest. Others were more subtle like manipulative wives who gained what they wanted while seemingly remaining docile and submissive. Some rebellion fermented into social and political movements. The revolt of still others was extremely executed by serial killers, criminals, and suicides. Contemporary readers can learn from these rebels and discern what values and ways that were uniquely Victorian should be retained and those that should be rejected after having observed their outcomes. To that end, this collection of essays offers a study for both novice and expert on Victorian rebels.
This book is about how ‘The Woman Question’ was represented in works of fiction published between 1850 and 1930. The essays here offer a wide-ranging and original approach to the ways in which literature shaped perceptions of the roles and position of women in society. Debates over ‘The Woman Question’ encompassed not only the struggle for voting rights, but gender equality more widely. The book reaches beyond the usual canonical texts to focus on writers who have, in the main, attracted relatively little critical attention in recent years: Stella Benson, Kate Chopin, Marie Corelli, Dinah Mulock Craik, Clemence Dane, Arthur Conan Doyle, George Gissing, Ouida, and William Hale White (...
The oddest book you may ever read, both fantastic autobiography and ground-breaking autofiction Count Nicolas de Toulouse Lautrec de Savine was a hero in battle and a legendary lover in bed. A daring adventurer and a shameless swindler. A gambler ready to place the riskiest bets and a coward apt to flee his creditors in the middle of the night. Tsar of Bulgaria and a Chicago streetcar conductor. A racist, a chauvinist, and an Antisemite. Was he all of these--or none of them? This is the question Stella Benson struggled with as she tried to shape the Count's wild recollections into a coherent story. Which mattered more: the factual truth or the fictional truth? Her answer anticipates today's field of creative nonfiction ñ while telling a wild, funny, and unique tale.
Every culture in the world has a version of the story of Cinderella. Surveying thousands of tellings of what is perhaps the most popular fairy tale of all time, this critical examination explores how the famous folk heroine embodies common societal values, traits and ethics. Multiple adaptations in Spain--gay Cinderella, suicidal Cinderella, censored Cinderella, masked Cinderella, porn Cinderella and others--highlight not only Spanish traditions, history and Zeitgeist, but reflect the story's global appeal on a philosophical level.
The period of 1830–1950 was an age of unprecedented innovation. From new inventions and scientific discoveries to reconsiderations of religion, gender, and the human mind, the innovations of this era are recorded in a wide range of literary texts. Rather than separating these texts into Victorian or modernist camps, this collection argues for a new framework that reveals how the concept of innovation generated forms of literary newness that drew novelists, poets, and other creative figures working across this period into dialogic networks of experiment. The 14 chapters in this volume explore how inventions like the rotary print press or hot air balloon and emergent debates about science, trade, and colonialism evolved new forms and genres. Through their examinations of a wide range of texts and writers—from well-known novelists like Conrad, Dickens, Hardy, and Woolf, to less canonical figures like Charlotte Mew, Elías Mar, and Walter Frances White—the chapters in this collection re-read these texts as part of an age of innovation characterized not by division and divide, but by collaboration and community.
The East End is an iconic area of London, from the transient street art of Banksy and Pablo Delgado to the exhibitions of Doreen Fletcher and Gilbert and George. Located east of the Tower of London and north of the River Thames, it has experienced a number of developmental stages in its four-hundred-year history. Originating as a series of scattered villages, the area has been home to Europe's worst slums and served as an affluent nodal point of the British Empire. Through its evolution, the East End has been the birthplace of radical political and social movements and the social center for a variety of diasporic communities. This reference work, with its alphabetically organized cross-referenced entries and its original and historical photography, serves as a comprehensive guide to the social and cultural history of this global hub.