The Accidental Enthusiast: On Collecting World War II Books in the Internet Age

Graduate Winner: 1st Place, 2010. 23rd Annual Carl Neureuther Student Book Collection Competitio

The Orphan Decade: Elizabeth Bowen’s 1930s Novels

This essay reads Elizabeth Bowen’s major novels of the 1930s – all of which feature orphaned protagonists – as mimetic of a decade that has often been critically “orphaned” in literary history. Bowen’s travelling orphans exemplify the problem of the political refugee in the 1930s, and her novels’ deliberately unresolved endings demonstrate an unwillingness to look into a future that seemed already foreclosed. By examining the novels of this orphan decade, in which the characters as well as the prose are simultaneously arrested and on the move, this essay offers a reassessment of Bowen’s novels’ importance to the way we read the 1930s.Cet essai interprète les principaux romans des années trente d’Elizabeth Bowen, dont chacun inclut quelques protagonistes orphelins, comme mimétiques d’une décennie souvent laissée « orpheline » dans l’histoire de la critique littéraire. Les orphelins itinérants de Bowen illustrent le problème du réfugié politique dans les années trente, et la fin délibérément non résolue de ses romans manifeste une réticence à envisager un avenir qui semble déjà déterminé. En examinant les romans de cette décennie orpheline, où les personnages, aussi bien que la prose, sont simultanément en arrêt et en mouvement, cet essai offre un correctif aux narratifs obsolètes de la littérature anglaise des années trente, ainsi qu’une réévaluation de l’importance des romans de Bowen pour la façon dont nous lisons cette décennie

Irish Literature of the Second World War: The Stylistics of Neutrality

Irish Literature of the Second World War: The Stylistics of Neutralityconsiders the impact of the wartime languages of propaganda, censorship, and espionage on the work of major Irish-born writers, in order to close a literary-historical gap in the way that the Second World War has been read. Samuel Beckett, Elizabeth Bowen, Louis MacNeice, and Flann O\u27Brien came to artistic maturity during the war years, but their war-related work has often been read as either literature of the British Home Front (Bowen\u27s novelThe Heat of the Dayand MacNeice\u27s collection,Springboard) or absurdist work without a wartime context (Beckett\u27sWattand O\u27Brien\u27sThe Third Policeman). Countering a long-held cultural mandate that the experience of World War II was alien to neutral Ireland and its literature, recent scholarship on Irish wartime neutrality has paved the way for crucial rereadings of Irish wartime literature. This dissertation demonstrates that major works by these canonical Irish writers are also major literary works of the Second World War. I suggest that is because these Irish textsdotake on the vexed question of war, and more particularly of the ways war calls into question language\u27s ability to function as a neutral conduit, that they constitute an important body of work. Characterized by stylistic contortions that challenge readability, the Irish literature of World War II challenges conventional definitions and geographies of the literature of war