Andrew Bennett

Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel

Foreword - Acknowledgements - List of Abbreviations - Introduction - Abeyances: The Hotel and The Last September - Shivered: To the North and Friends and Relations - Fanatic Immobility: The House in Paris - Dream Wood: The Death of the Heart - Sheer Kink: The Heat of the Day - Obelisk: A World of Love - Trance: The Little Girls - Convulsions: Eva Trout - Index

The Wordsworthian enlightenment : romantic poetry and the ecology of reading

Over the past four decades, Geoffrey Hartmans voice has been one of the most important and profound in contemporary literary theory. Most noted for his scholarship on Wordsworth and Romanticism, Hartman developed throughout his work an original conception of the relationship between literary and critical writing that is still considered a deeply significant contribution to the field. In The Wordsworthian Enlightenment, the most important contemporary critics of Romantic poetry and trauma reflect on Hartmans work and its lasting influence. This collection of sixteen essays-including a new essay from Hartman-provides a wide-ranging and thorough perspective on recent approaches to Romanticism. Contributors: Leslie Brisman, Yale University; Gerald L. Bruns, University of Notre Dame; Cathy Caruth, Emory University; Helen Regueiro Elam, University of Albany; Frances Ferguson, University of Chicago; Paul H. Fry, Yale University; Kevis Goodman, University of California at Berkeley; Ortwin de Graef, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Belgium); Robert J. Griffin, Texas A & M University; Geoffrey Hartman, Yale University; J. Douglas Kneale, University of Western Ontario; Alan Liu, University of California, Santa Barbara; Peter J. Manning, Stony Brook University; Donald G. Marshall, Pepperdine University; J. Hillis Miller, University of California at Irvine; Lucy Newlyn, Oxford University; Patricia Parker, Stanford University.

Hating Katherine Mansfield

exactly, you can’t help noticing Virginia Woolf’s ambivalence towards her friend and fellow writer Katherine Mansfield. The close as well as often somewhat guarded relationship between the two women – at times intense, supportive, at times more wary and founded, Woolf said, on “quicksands”1 – throws intriguing light on both writers. Since both Woolf and Mansfield were attempting to forge a new language for fiction, since both were highly conscious of the relationship between gender and writing, and since both were, as Angela Smith puts it, at the same time “complicit with patriarchy and in opposition to it,”2 there was a certain identification at work in their relationship which, for Woolf at least, involved issues of sympathy, fear of contagion and the passion of jealousy. In Woolf’s letters and diaries, avowals and disavowals of jealousy appear almost obsessively over a period of three or four years: “My jealousy,” she writes in July 1918, “is only a film on the surface beneath which is nothing but pure generosity”;3 and then in April 1920, on the subject of Mansfield, “we writers are never jealous” (LVW ii.430); but “It’s awful to be afflicted with jealousy,” she writes again of Mansfield in August (LVW ii.438); and then in December, in a diary, “I’ve plucked out my jealousy of Katherine by writing her an insincere–sincere letter” (DVW ii.80); “I was happy to hear K[atherine] abused the other night” she writes in another entry from December, “in my heart I must think her good, since I’m glad to hear her abused” (DVW ii.78); “I’m not the least jealous of Katherine, though every review praises her,” she declares in January 1921 (LVW ii.454); and then in March 1922: “I’ve not read Katherine Mansfield, and don’t mean to. ... People say that we writers are jealous” (LVW ii.514–15); and finally, “Am I jealous, even now[?],” she asks herself soon after Mansfield’s death in 1923 (DVW ii.238). If jealousy was a continuing issue for Woolf, her initial reactions to Mansfield and to her friend’s work were complicated by shameless social snobbery articulated within a rhetoric of contagion. Woolf tells her sister Vanessa that Mansfield was “cheap and hard,” that she was “unpleasant but forcible and utterly unscrupulous” (LVW ii.144). After reading “Bliss,” Woolf declares the story to be “so brilliant – so hard, and so shallow, and so sentimental that I had to rush to the bookcase for something to drink”: “She’s done for!,” Woolf concludes triumphantly (LVW ii.514). In 1931, eight years

A reassessment of Elizabeth Bowen's Friends and Relations: the quiet catastrophe

This essay proposes a re-reading of Elizabeth Bowens largely overlooked third novel, Friends and Relations. Focussing on effects such as stammering, bathos, narrative catastrophe, narrative voice and non-human animals, allows for a proper appreciation of the radical possibilities that are opened up within Bowens innovative narrative form.

'Enticing Conclusion': John Keats's 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'

Abstract Time is the crux for all potential lyric writers as it is for all potential seducers, as Andrew Marvell demonstrates in his dual attempt to engage with his Coy Mistress and with his Coy Reader (both are seduced into attending by the energy and enigma of the poets opening couplet). Because of his desire to suspend time2, the lyric poet has conspicuously refused the temporal harness that narrative applies with its implicit connections between verses, between lines, between words.