The “Presence of Movement” in the Works of Elizabeth Bowen

This thesis explores representations of space and movement and the relationship between them in Elizabeth Bowen’s work to examine how she registers the shifting material, social, cultural, and psychological landscapes of the twentieth century. The first chapter examines how a rhetoric of “overflow” permeates Bowen’s interwar writing. By addressing her relationship with Ireland, the Irish Sea, and the coast of Kent, it reveals how her early work articulates scientific and cultural understandings of flux and fluidity, as well as the function and failure of boundaries, focusing on how moments of “overflow” challenge the im/permeability of spaces. The second chapter explores how the “North” in Bowen’s To the North (1932) functions as a complex geographic, historical, cultural, and political symbol, as well as a literal and figurative destination that is at once a site and a shifting threshold. Focusing on modern experiences of speed and transport, the chapter investigates how tensions between movement and stillness, by way of the literal and metaphoric “North”, propel this interwar novel forward. The third chapter approaches the Second World War through a reading of “evacuated” spaces in Bowen’s wartime writing. Addressing her movements between England and Ireland, it uses Michel Foucault’s concept of “Heterotopia” to examine how war unsettled and destabilised spatial dynamics at a time when both space and movement were restricted and redefined. The fourth and final chapter turns to the movement of time, using the lens of Bowen’s travel memoir, A Time in Rome (1960), to examine the literal and literary intersections of space and time. Focusing on novels which produce complex, layered spatio-temporalities, the chapter attends to the unravelling of linear time as Bowen’s writing begins to respond to twentieth-century concerns about memory and inheritance in the face of an uncertain future. This thesis contributes to the reassessment of Bowen’s work within modernism and modernist spatiality. Bowen’s literary relationship with space, this thesis offers, is born out of a conscious engagement with movement, with all the scientific, technological, political, and social meanings it entailed. It argues that Bowen uses the literal and figurative relationship between space and movement to transcribe her characters’ inner and outer lives as her texts engage with a late modernist exteriority that seeks to respond to the changing material and ontological realities of the twentieth century.<p></p>

Author dc:creator

• Farah Nada (21049847)

• Elizabeth Bowen
• Modernism
• Ireland
• Space
• Spatiality
• Movement
• British Literature
• British Modernism
• Anglo-Irish
• Modernist Literature
• Bowen
• Second World War
• Interwar

Statement dc:rights

• All rights reserved
• Open Access after 2027-10-27

Identifier

10779/exe.32077209.v1

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:figshare.com:article/32077209