Reconsidering Elizabeth Bowen’s Shorter Fiction

Download or read book Reconsidering Elizabeth Bowen’s Shorter Fiction written by Heather Levy and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-12-03 with total page 157 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reconsidering Elizabeth Bowen’s Shorter Fiction: Dead Reckoning focuses on Elizabeth Bowen's representations of violence against the self and others. Heather Levy examines the complicity of landscape and the implications of mayhem, murder, and suicide in The Collected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen (2006) edited by Angus Wilson and The Bazaar and Other Stories (2008) edited by Alan Hepburn. It introduces five previously unpublished short story fragments and two nearly complete stories from The Elizabeth Bowen Collection at The Harry Ransom Research Center. Levy argues that Bowen's shorter fiction is a quixotic celebration of moral transgression, crime without punishment, and suicide without mourners. Bowen's compassionate response to offenders and violence anticipated the Perpetrator Trauma movement in the United States. Her innovations with the freedom of the short story produced an uncanny narration of violence. This book integrates the entirety of the scholarship on Bowen's short stories in a clear and original manner and offers a synthetic and compelling excavation of Bowen's unpublished short stories.