Deadline extended:

Modern Fiction Studies announces a call for papers for an upcoming
special issue on
Elizabeth Bowen

Guest Editor: Susan Osborn
Deadline for Submissions: 1 September 2006

Elizabeth Bowen's initial interpreters generally regarded her as a
lesser social or domestic realist, primarily concerned with issues
relating to the demise of Irish Protestant Ascendancy. Yet more recent
readers, including Maud Ellmann, Neil Corcoran, Andrew Bennett, Nicholas
Royle, Robert Caserio, and Julian Moynahan, have recognized her fiction
as being as crucial as Samuel Beckett's to our understanding of
twentieth-century literature. As a result of this new appreciation,
Bowen's controversial and challenging fiction has become a site of
undercharted potentiality and importance.

This special issue is intended to broaden the critical framework of
Bowen scholarship by more clearly mapping her works' position in
relation to contemporary critical concerns and to various
twentieth-century literary, artistic, and intellectual traditions and
movements. How has our understanding of modernism abetted and interfered
with a recognition of the value of Bowen's work? How do Bowen's newly
identified literary geographies relate to shifts in our understanding of
modernism generally? Bowen's narratives have been called pictorial: in
what ways does Bowen adopt a "visual" approach and what are the
aesthetic and ethical implications of such an approach? How does her
work challenge the norms and boundaries of realism? How do the formal
irregularities in her narratives connect to or help reveal changing
ideas about the interrelated questions of sexuality, gender, ethnicity,
nation, race, and war? How does her work estrange the conventionally
conceived dialogic relation of reader and narrative? What are her
narratives' Beckettian affinities? What is the relation of the comic to
Bowen's irregular narratives? How does her work interrogate
conventional notions of literary history? This list of questions is
intended to be suggestive, not exhaustive; any fresh perspective that
produces an insightful and rigorously argued reading is welcome, as are
interdisciplinary approaches.

Essays should range in length from 6,000 to 9,000 words (excluding notes
and works cited) and should follow the current edition of the MLA Style
Manual. Please submit two copies of the essay along with a cover sheet
that lists the author's name, essay title, mailing address, telephone
number, and email address. Mfs does not accept electronic submissions.
Please mail essays and cover letters to the following address:

Editors, Modern Fiction Studies
Purdue University
Department of English
500 Oval Drive
West Lafayette, IN 47907-2038

Queries regarding this issue should be made to Susan Osborn
susosborn_at_patmedia.net.

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Received on Fri Feb 24 2006 - 11:27:07 EST