Allan Hepburn – författare

During and after the Second World War, there was a concerted thinking about religion in Britain. Not only were leading international thinkers of the day theologians--Ronald Niebuhr, Paul Tillich, Jacques Maritain--but leading writers contributed to discussions about religion. Graham Greene, Muriel Spark, and Barbara Pym incorporated miracles, evil, and church-going into their novels, while Louis MacNeice, T. S. Eliot, and C. S. Lewis gave radio broadcasts about the role of Christianity in contemporary society. Certainly the war revived interest in aspects of Christian life. Salvation and redemption were on many people's minds. The Ministry of Information used images of bombed churches to stoke patriotic fervour, and King George VI led a series of Days of National Prayer that coincided with crucial events in the Allied campaign. After the war and throughout the 1950s, approximately 1.4 million Britons converted to Roman Catholicism as a way of expressing their spiritual ambitions and solidarity with humanity on a world-wide scale. Religion provided one way for writers to answer the question, 'what is man?' It also afforded ways to think about social obligation and ethical engagement. Moreover, the mid-century turn to religion offered ways to articulate statehood, not from the perspective of nationhood and politics, but from the perspective of moral action and social improvement. Instead of being a retreat into seclusion and solitude, the mid-century turn to religion is a call to responsibility.

A common thread in mid-century British novels is citizenship, a problematic concept that took cues from the imperatives of civic responsibility that arose during the Second World War and persisted through the innovative programs of the welfare state. From George Orwell to Mary Renault and William Golding, authors liberated themselves from the parameters of actual states and created hypothetical scenarios about citizenship: citizen-soldiers, world citizens, citizens of the future, or nuclear citizens threatened with atomic bombs and possible extinction. In Citizenship in Mid-Century British Literature, Allan Hepburn explores the ways novelists speculated about how states come into existence, how long they last, and what causes them to fail or disappear. Hepburn's analysis integrates critical points in twentieth-century British history, such as the internment of aliens in the Second World War, the arrival of racialized citizens in the UK after 1948, and the exclusion of queer people from the presumptively heterosexual state. Through history and fiction, Citizenship in Mid-Century British Literature ponders the idea of statehood and who counts as a good citizen.

Friends are at the centre of novels by everyone from George Eliot to Elena Ferrante. It is nearly impossible to name a work of fiction that is not enriched by the tensions and magnetisms of friendship.Friendship and the Novel focuses on the affective and narrative possibilities created by friendship in fiction. Friendship enables plots about rivalry, education, compassion, pity, deceit, betrayal, animosity, and breakup. It crosses boundaries of gender, class, nationality, disposition, race, age, and experience. Some novels offer lessons about distinguishing good friends from bad. In a Bildungsroman, friends contribute to the development of the protagonist through example or advice, as if novels were manuals for making and keeping friends. Sometimes sparks fly between friends and friendship swerves into sexual intimacy. Sally Rooney and other contemporary writers take friendship online.The essays in Friendship and the Novel illustrate how friendship, in its many forms – short or lifelong, intense or circumstantial – is a central problem and an abiding mystery in fiction as in life, a subject that continues to shape the novel as a literary form and, in turn, its readers.Contributors include Robert L. Caserio (Penn State), Maria DiBattista (Princeton), Jay Dickson (Reed), Brian Gingrich (Texas), Jonathan Greenberg (Montclair State), Barry McCrea (Notre Dame), Deborah Epstein Nord (Princeton), Erwin Rosinberg (Emory), Jacqueline Shin (Towson), Lisa Sternlieb (Penn State), and Emily Wittman (Alabama).

Friends are at the centre of novels by everyone from George Eliot to Elena Ferrante. It is nearly impossible to name a work of fiction that is not enriched by the tensions and magnetisms of friendship.Friendship and the Novel focuses on the affective and narrative possibilities created by friendship in fiction. Friendship enables plots about rivalry, education, compassion, pity, deceit, betrayal, animosity, and breakup. It crosses boundaries of gender, class, nationality, disposition, race, age, and experience. Some novels offer lessons about distinguishing good friends from bad. In a Bildungsroman, friends contribute to the development of the protagonist through example or advice, as if novels were manuals for making and keeping friends. Sometimes sparks fly between friends and friendship swerves into sexual intimacy. Sally Rooney and other contemporary writers take friendship online.The essays in Friendship and the Novel illustrate how friendship, in its many forms – short or lifelong, intense or circumstantial – is a central problem and an abiding mystery in fiction as in life, a subject that continues to shape the novel as a literary form and, in turn, its readers.Contributors include Robert L. Caserio (Penn State), Maria DiBattista (Princeton), Jay Dickson (Reed), Brian Gingrich (Texas), Jonathan Greenberg (Montclair State), Barry McCrea (Notre Dame), Deborah Epstein Nord (Princeton), Erwin Rosinberg (Emory), Jacqueline Shin (Towson), Lisa Sternlieb (Penn State), and Emily Wittman (Alabama).

An inventive and surprising examination of a century of spy fiction.Why do spies have such cachet in the twentieth century? Why do they keep reinventing themselves? What do they mean in a political process? This book examines the tradition of the spy narrative from its inception in the late nineteenth century through the present day. Ranging from John le Carré’s bestsellers to Elizabeth Bowen’s novels, from James Bond to John Banville’s contemporary narratives, Allan Hepburn sets the historical contexts of these fictions: the Cambridge spy ring; the Profumo Affair; the witch-hunts against gay men in the civil service and diplomatic corps in the 1950s.Instead of focusing on the formulaic nature of the genre, Intrigue emphasizes the responsiveness of spy stories to particular historical contingencies. Hepburn begins by offering a systematic theory of the conventions and attractions of espionage fiction and then examines the British and Irish tradition of spy novels. A final section considers the particular form that American spy narratives have taken as they have cross-fertilized with the tradition of American romance in works such as Joan Didion’s Democracy andJohn Barth’s Sabbatical.

Throughout her career, Elizabeth Bowen, the Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer, also wrote literary essays that display a shrewd, generous intelligence. Always sensitive to underlying tensions, she evokes the particular climate of countries and places in "Hungary," "Prague and the Crisis," and "Bowen's Court." In "Britain in Autumn," she records the strained atmosphere of the blitz as no other writer does. Immediately after the war, she reported on the International Peace Conference in Paris in a series of essays that are startling in their evocation of tense diplomacy among international delegates scrabbling to define the boundaries of Europe and the stakes of the Cold War. The aftershock of war registers poignantly in "Opening Up the House": owners evacuated during the war return to their houses empty since 1939. Other essays in this volume, especially those on James Joyce, Jane Austen, and the technique of writing, offer indispensable mid-century evaluations of the state of literature.The essays assembled in this volume were published in British, Irish, and American periodicals during Bowen's lifetime. She herself did not gather them into any collection. Some of these essays exist only as typescript drafts and are published here for the first time. Bowen's observations on age, toys, disappointment, charm, and manners place her among the very best literary essayists of the modernist period.

Throughout her career, Elizabeth Bowen, the Anglo-Irish novelist and short story writer, also wrote literary essays that display a shrewd, generous intelligence. Always sensitive to underlying tensions, she evokes the particular climate of countries and places in "Hungary," "Prague and the Crisis," and "Bowen's Court." In "Britain in Autumn," she records the strained atmosphere of the blitz as no other writer does. Immediately after the war, she reported on the International Peace Conference in Paris in a series of essays that are startling in their evocation of tense diplomacy among international delegates scrabbling to define the boundaries of Europe and the stakes of the Cold War. The aftershock of war registers poignantly in "Opening Up the House": owners evacuated during the war return to their houses empty since 1939. Other essays in this volume, especially those on James Joyce, Jane Austen, and the technique of writing, offer indispensable mid-century evaluations of the state of literature.The essays assembled in this volume were published in British, Irish, and American periodicals during Bowen's lifetime. She herself did not gather them into any collection. Some of these essays exist only as typescript drafts and are published here for the first time. Bowen's observations on age, toys, disappointment, charm, and manners place her among the very best literary essayists of the modernist period.

A prolific writer of short stories, Elizabeth Bowen claimed towards the end of her life that "a story deals in the not-yet-thought-of but always possible." Covering a range of situations - broken engagements, encounters with ghosts, brushes with crime - these stories demonstrate the virtuosity of technique that characterizes all of Bowen's writing. "The Lost Hope" ranks with the best of her war stories. Shattering the lives of soldiers and civilians alike, the war cancels the promise shown by the generation that came of age in the 1940s. Yet the war also clears a path to the future, as happens in "Comfort and Joy" and "The Last Bus." Bowen's characters live in the grip of intense circumstances. They respond ardently or ironically to their dilemmas, and sometimes both at once, as does sulky, big-limbed Doris Simonez in "Flowers Will Do." If some of the children in these stories are too wise for their age, like the punctual protagonist of "The Unromantic Princess," adults occasionally behave with no insight at all into their actions. Humour in these tales ranges from the sardonic to the light-hearted. In the title story, "The Bazaar," Captain Winch begs everyone for pins and ends up stealing some. Lady Hottenham gives an impromptu little speech that drifts agonizingly into cliché. The fairy tales, fables, and social dramas in this volume were never gathered together during Bowen's lifetime; a few exist only in unfinished draft. With this collection, Bowen, gifted with keen social observation, justifies her place in the company of D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce.Key Features:*Brings together for the first time Bowen's uncollected short stories*Demonstrates the diversity of Bowen's short fiction across her writing career*The stories cover familiar Bowen themes of marriage, travel, estrangement, disappointment and disinheritance*Completes the picture of Bowen as a compelling writing of the short story

The novelist Elizabeth Bowen believed that media was a personal and social force. From the 1940s to the 1960s, she took an active role in the media and radio in particular by writing essays for radio broadcast, improvising interviews on the air and giving public lectures. Despite her pronounced stammer and her complaints that reading her own work gave her lockjaw, she was a spellbinding talker. Bowen became known as a public intellectual capable of talking on numerous subjects with wit and general insight. Invited to university campuses in the UK and US, she delivered important lectures on language, the 'fear of pleasure', character in fiction, the idea of American homes and other topics. Her first efforts for radio were adaptations of her own short stories and dramatizations of literary subjects. She quickly turned to commentary on culture, such as the beginning of the BBC Third Programme and the atmosphere in postwar Czechoslovakia. She documented her love of cinema in the 1930s and the making of Lawrence of Arabia in the 1960s, and broadcast on Queen Elizabeth II, Frances Burney and Jane Austen. During her lifetime, Bowen published few of her broadcasts. Listening In brings together a substantial number of her ungathered and unknown works for the first time. Key Featureso The third volume from Edinburgh University Press that brings Bowen's previously ungathered and unknown works to the reading publico Advances scholarly knowledge about radio in modernism and makes Bowen's voice known within modernist media studieso Helps to define the public role of the writer and women's roles in the postwar yearso An exciting new source for students of adaptation, both in Bowen's adaptations of her own work for radio and her broadcasts about Jane Austen and Frances Burney.

The novelist Elizabeth Bowen believed that media was a personal and social force. From the 1940s to the 1960s, she took an active role in the media and radio in particular by writing essays for radio broadcast, improvising interviews on the air and giving public lectures. Despite her pronounced stammer and her complaints that reading her own work gave her lockjaw, she was a spellbinding talker. Bowen became known as a public intellectual capable of talking on numerous subjects with wit and general insight. Invited to university campuses in the UK and US, she delivered important lectures on language, the 'fear of pleasure', character in fiction, the idea of American homes and other topics. Her first efforts for radio were adaptations of her own short stories and dramatizations of literary subjects. She quickly turned to commentary on culture, such as the beginning of the BBC Third Programme and the atmosphere in postwar Czechoslovakia. She documented her love of cinema in the 1930s and the making of Lawrence of Arabia in the 1960s, and broadcast on Queen Elizabeth II, Frances Burney and Jane Austen. During her lifetime, Bowen published few of her broadcasts. Listening In brings together a substantial number of her ungathered and unknown works for the first time. Key Featureso The third volume from Edinburgh University Press that brings Bowen's previously ungathered and unknown works to the reading publico Advances scholarly knowledge about radio in modernism and makes Bowen's voice known within modernist media studieso Helps to define the public role of the writer and women's roles in the postwar yearso An exciting new source for students of adaptation, both in Bowen's adaptations of her own work for radio and her broadcasts about Jane Austen and Frances Burney.

This book provides innovative, up-to-date essays about Elizabeth Bowen's fiction. It integrates the latest thinking about her engagement, stances, and knowledge of twentieth-century literary movements. Elizabeth Bowen often remarked that she grew up with the twentieth century. Indeed, her writings are coterminous with the technological, social, and cultural developments of modernity. Her novels and short stories, like her essays, register changes in architecture, visual art, soundscapes, the aesthetics and technique of fiction, attitudes towards sex and greater social freedom for women, and the long repercussions of warfare across the twentieth century. Bowen's writing reflects a deep engagement with other authors, whether they were her antecedents - Jane Austen, Marcel Proust, and D. H. Lawrence, among others - or her contemporaries, such as Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, and Eudora Welty. Her fiction and essays are a barometer of the literary, political, social, and cultural contexts in which she lived and wrote.

Between 1900 and 1960, many writers in France and Britain either had parallel careers in diplomatic corps or frequented diplomatic circles: Paul Claudel, Albert Cohen, Lawrence Durrell, Graham Greene, John le Carré, André Malraux, Nancy Mitford, Marcel Proust, and others. What attracts writers to diplomacy, and what attracts diplomats to publishing their experiences in memoirs or novels?Like novelists, diplomats are in the habit of describing situations with an eye for atmosphere, personalities, and looming crises. Yet novels about diplomats, far from putting a solemn face on everything, often devolve into comedy if not outright farce. Anachronistic yet charming, diplomats take the long view of history and social transformation, which puts them out of step with their times – at least in fiction. In this collection of essays, eleven contributors reflect on diplomacy in French and British novels, with particular focus on temporality, style, comedy, characterization, and the professional liabilities attached to representing a state abroad. With archival examples as evidence, the essays in this volume indicate that modern fiction, especially fiction about diplomacy, is a response to the increasing speed of communication, the decline of imperial power, and the ceding of old ways of negotiating to new.

Enchanted Objects investigates the relationship between visual art and contemporary fiction, addressing the problems that arise when paintings, deluxe books, porcelains, or statues are represented in contemporary novels. The distinction between objects and art objects depends on aesthetics. While some objects are authenticated through museum exhibits, others are hidden, broken, neglected, coveted, hoarded, or salvaged.Allan Hepburn asks four broad questions about aesthetics and value: What is a detail in visual art? Is all art ornamental? Does the value of an object increase because it is fragile? What defines ugliness? Contemporary novels, such as Tracy Chevalier's Girl with a Pearl Earring, Barry Unsworth's Stone Virgin, and Bruce Chatwin's Utz offer implicit answers to these questions while critiquing museums and the determination to invest objects with value through display. Addressing current debates in museum studies, cultural studies, art history, and literary criticism, Enchanted Objects develops an extensive theory of how contemporary literature engages with and relates to aesthetic objects.