Ivy and Bones: Ruins and Reversibility During the Blitz

Abstract

‘Ivy and Bones: Ruins and Reversibility During the Blitz’ examines how the representation of the ruins of the Blitz is informed by the aesthetic and semiotic tension between abstraction, modernist purity and picturesque accretion. Subsequently building on the notion of reversibility, it explores the way wartime destruction and/or cultural decline is recorded as well as counteracted and compensated for in works by Elizabeth Bowen, Herbert Furst, Claire Leighton, Rose Macaulay, John Piper, and Virginia Woolf. The trope of reversibility provides a template to consider some of the sites where aesthetic conflicts are re-enacted, from blitzed spaces to the printed page as threatened modernist artefact and cultural asset.

Keywords

• E. Bowen
• H. Furst
• R. Macaulay
• V. Woolf
• abstraction
• Blitz