Author: Elizabeth Bowen File Type: epub span Apple-style-span normal 12px Five words of advice on reading Elizabeth Bowen Resist the urge to skim. In The Death of the Heart, Bowens writing rolls ever onward, accruing the sensations and ironies of conscious living till the final effect is massive. This is not prose for people who like their fiction with a cool, Calvin Klein-like minimalism. Bowens people are keenly aware, and she seems to catalogue every sweaty moment, every betraying glance. The reader must stay right there with her, because hidden among lengthy descriptions of sea air and drawing-room politics are pithy asides worthy of great humorists Absence blots people out. We really have no absent friends. Skimmers miss out.spanThe Death of the Heart is Bowens most perfectly made book. Portia, an orphan, comes to live in London with her half-brother, Thomas, and his wife, Anna. A child of sin raised in a series of shabby French hotels, Portia is possessed of a kind of terrible innocence. Like Chance the Gardener in pigtails, she literally cant comprehend evil or unkind motives. Unfortunately for her, she falls in with Annas friend Eddie, who seems to be made entirely of bad motives. Though the plot follows Portias relationship with Eddie, the novels real tension lies between Portia and Anna, as the girl comes to grief against the shoals of Annas glittering, urbane cynicism. But the book transcends the theme of innocence corrupted. As in Graham Greenes The Quiet American, Bowen inverts the formula to show the destructive power of innocence itself blockquoteInnocence so constantly finds itself in a false position that inwardly innocent people learn to be disingenuous.... Incurable strangers to the world, they never cease to exact a heroic happiness. Their singleness, their ruthlessness, their one continuous wish makes them bound to be cruel, and to suffer cruelty. The innocent are so few that two of them seldom meet--and when they do, their victims lie strewn all around.blockquoteBowen has a fine eye for such shadings of morality, but finer still is her understanding of the way humans bump up against the material world. Her writing on weather, both emotional and meteorological, compares with the best of Henry James Ones first day by the sea, ones being feels salt, strong, resilient, and hollow--like a seaweed pod not giving under the heel.Always a sensitive observer of the way we live, in her lesser books Bowen deals in mind games and then delivers trumped-up, bloody endings. In The Death of the Heart, she keeps all the action between her characters ears, and comes up with one of the great midcentury psychological novels. --Claire DedererReviewA witty, lucid, and beautiful psychological novel.. . . By far her best book. --_The New Yorker_ Bowen is a major writer. . . . She is what happened after Bloomsbury . . . the link that connects Virginia Woolf with Iris Murdoch and Muriel Spark. --Victoria Glendinning Bowen writes with both art and skillful artifice. . . . [The] quality of restraint, of the unsaid, gives her novel its curious tautness and intensity. --_The New York Times_ [The Death of the Heart] manages to make a major statement about human character. . . . We finish the book with that sense fiction nowadays rarely communicates, of lifes having been mysteriously enlarged. --_The New Yorker_

Author: Mary McAleer Balkun File Type: pdf Fakery, authenticity, and identity in American literature and culture at the turn of the 20th centuryFocusing on texts written between 1880 and 1930, Mary McAleer Balkun explores the concept of the counterfeit, both in terms of material goods and invented identities, and the ways that the acquisition of objects came to define individuals in American culture and literature. Counterfeiting is, in one sense, about the creation of something that appears authentican invented self, a museum display, a forged work of art. But the counterfeit can also be a means by which the authentic is measured, thereby creating our conception of the true or real.When counterfeiting is applied to individual identities, it fosters fluidityin social boundaries and the games of social climbing and passing that have come to be representative of American culture the Horatio Alger story, the con man or huckster, the social climber, the ethnically ambiguous.Balkun provides new readings of traditional texts such as The Great Gatsby, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and The House of Mirth, as well as readings of less-studied texts, such as Walt Whitmans Specimen Days and Nella Larsens Passing. In each of these texts, Balkun locates the presence of manufactured identities and counterfeit figures, demonstrating that where authenticity and consumerism intersect, the self becomes but another commodity to be promoted, sold, and eventually consumed.ReviewA powerful and provocative book that will appeal to a wide readership, from literary critics to historians of American culture, from university professors to high school teachers . . . The American Counterfeit is a happy combination of traditional literary criticism and cutting-edge cultural studies, opening new views on familiar texts as well as on the society that produced them.-- Christoph Irmscher, author of The Poetics of Natural HistoryBook DescriptionFocusing on texts written between 1880 and 1930, Mary McAleer Balkun explores the concept of the counterfeit, both in terms of material goods and invented identities, and the ways that the acquisition of objects came to define individuals in American culture and literature. Counterfeiting is, in one sense, about the creation of something that appears authentican invented self, a museum display, a forged work of art. But the counterfeit can also be a means by which the authentic is measured, thereby creating our conception of the true or real.When counterfeiting is applied to individual identities, it fosters fluidityin social boundaries and the games of social climbing and passing that have come to be representative of American culture the Horatio Alger story, the con man or huckster, the social climber, the ethnically ambiguous.Balkun provides new readings of traditional texts such as The Great Gatsby, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and The House of Mirth, as well as readings of less-studied texts, such as Walt Whitmans Specimen Days and Nella Larsens Passing. In each of these texts, Balkun locates the presence of manufactured identities and counterfeit figures, demonstrating that where authenticity and consumerism intersect, the self becomes but another commodity to be promoted, sold, and eventually consumed.