A Writer Of Innovation

If people want to look back upon the history of the Second World War especially the English human spirit in those days, one writer should never be forgotten. As one of the only two English writers who convey what life in blitzed London was like, her strange and extraordinary revelation of English behavior and feeling and her perceptions which range from marvelous realistic observation of daily life to the innermost recesses of the human soul made her the master of the shape and form and talk of the world with the miraculous psychological insight, and also make her own name familiar to the descendants even after her death. This is Elizabeth Bowen.Though it is difficult to place her in the canon because of her particular style, she was praised to be one of the finest writers of fiction in the twentieth century and has been arousing more and more interests of critics as well as readers. Her famous novel The Death of the Heart has been selected as one of"100 English novels in the 20th century"by American Random House in 1998 and"100 best English-language novels from 1923 to the present"by TIME magazine recently. Apart from 10 novels such as The Heat of Day, The House of Paris, she also contributed nearly 70 short stories in her lifetime and a quantity of comments about literature and arts. She was not only a novelist, short story writer, essayist but also a critic and an editor. It may be easy to categorize her writing into traditional realism in the first half of the 20th century but with the influence of modernism, she adopted innovative methods in her writing as much as possible.As an Anglo-Irish novelist, she responds to this world as an"outsider"and"always wrote about the English from an angle which suggests a stranger on the edge of a circle of friends". Besides, she always remains an upper-class woman of hardy, firm intelligence. But for her, passion and love are so essentially moulded into life that she is with heart responding to all the fascinations and desperations, the frustrations, the deadened routines, and the sudden-awakened emotional currents of family life. Bowen has often been called a novelist of"sensibility". Actually, this designation to Bowen is to underestimate the breadth of her talent. Bowen uses her sensibility as an instrument, merely, for producing the particular effects at which she is aiming in her novels and stories.In this thesis, I try to review some of Bowen's short stories especially during the war time, mainly focusing on their themes and narrative ways which the writer successfully achieved to flesh out the themes. In sum, she explores themes of psychological shock, social and cultural dislocation, and other deleterious effects brought about by the war. And besides, these works reflect the instinctive and great power of the human imagination to create and sustain new images of peace and immunity that allow life to go on. Bowen makes full use of techniques to reveal the themes. The writing skills include metaphor or symbolism, impressionistic technique, psychological description including the stream of consciousness and epiphany, depiction from the"Sense Center"of the character, ironic method, flashback technique, etc. Through an integrated analysis I wish to offer more thorough impression and deeper understanding of this writer and her works. Moreover, it is interesting to do some investigation on connections of her life and her writing, her comparison with other contemporary authors. However, due to the limitation of my own knowledge and language, my essay is just the beginning of the topic about Elizabeth Bowen. Though Bowen's reputation at present is much lower than it should be, I believe there will be a reassessment, naturally because she was one of the greatest masters of English language in the history of English literature.