Estudios Irlandeses (Mar 2010)
Elizabeth Bowen, Modernism, and the Spectre of Anglo-Ireland
Abstract
The recent scholarly focus on Elizabeth Bowen’s modernism tends to reinforce a false dichotomy between Bowen as an Ascendancy Big House novelist and Bowen as a literary modernist. In keeping with Jameson’s argument that the colonial experience is at the root of Western modernism, I propose that her representations of Anglo-Irish Big House culture, in The Last September in particular, are in fact focal points for understanding Bowen as a modernist, and I argue that the Gothic, with its unavoidable political and colonial resonances, is fundamental to Bowen’s Irish modernism.
