Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I The nineteenth century
- Part II The modernist short story
- Part III Post-modernist stories
- Introduction: theories of form
- Chapter 8 Frank O'Connor and Sean O'Faolain
- Chapter 9 Elizabeth Bowen and V. S. Pritchett
- Chapter 10 Angela Carter and Ian McEwan
- Part IV Postcolonial and other stories
- Notes
- Guide to further reading
- Index
- Titles in this series:
Chapter 9 - Elizabeth Bowen and V. S. Pritchett
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Part I The nineteenth century
- Part II The modernist short story
- Part III Post-modernist stories
- Introduction: theories of form
- Chapter 8 Frank O'Connor and Sean O'Faolain
- Chapter 9 Elizabeth Bowen and V. S. Pritchett
- Chapter 10 Angela Carter and Ian McEwan
- Part IV Postcolonial and other stories
- Notes
- Guide to further reading
- Index
- Titles in this series:
Summary
If you have been reading this book from the beginning, you will be aware that Elizabeth Bowen's is a name to conjure with in the history of short story criticism. She would doubtless have wondered at this, for unlike many of her modernist predecessors she had little truck with the academy, nor did she believe that professional reading furnished one with special purchase over literary work. Indeed, it struck her as ‘sad to regard as lecture-room subject books that were meant to be part of life’. And yet, over the course of a long career she amassed a sizeable quantity of reviews, prefaces and essays, and in the case of her 1936 introduction to The Faber Book of Modern Short Stories produced arguably the first masterpiece in criticism of the short form. For all that she disdained the institutionalization of literature, Bowen has come to occupy a central place in the academic study of twentieth-century fiction both as a writer and critic.
It was not always so. Only in the last ten years has Bowen's work begun to attract the scholarly attention it demands and deserves. Before that, it suffered the fate of so much of the literature produced in the wake of high-modernism, of being somehow after the fact. Unlike the central modernists – Eliot, Pound, Beckett, Woolf – Bowen never adhered to any manifesto or ‘boarded any bandwagons’, with the effect that her writing has ‘tended to elude the standard taxonomies of modern writing’.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English , pp. 112 - 124Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007