Whether taken as literal phenomena or as loose semantic suggestions, ghosts make their mark on virtually every piece of Bowen’s writing. This chapter focuses on the more suggestive ghostliness that spans her oeuvre by way of the threat and realities of a haunting dispossession. Her treatment of dispossession uncannily exposes a relation between the social and the physical or the public and the private. Embodied, subjectively lived experience conjoins with the forces of history, ideas, and conventions. In forging these relationships, the always unsettling crises of modern dispossession at the heart of Bowen’s work articulate her astute theory of historical change and the problem of historical accountability in the aftermath of traumatic events. This essay proposes two ideas – claustrophobia and flight – for thinking about ghostly dispossession in her short stories and novels. The unviable past makes itself known through an unsettling claustrophobia, and those who have been dispossessed and find no workable alternative haunt in their turn, projecting ghostliness into the future via the urge to flee. No one escapes the effects of dispossession, making it, for Bowen, the condition of twentieth-century modernity.

This essay assesses Bowen’s relationship to the English author D. H. Lawrence, and suggests that in view of the chronological overlap in their careers, the latter was effectively a contemporary as well as a forerunner. Bowen regarded Lawrence as a major author but also identified with him as an ‘outsider’ to cosmopolitan English literary circles. Both novelists are transitional figures, comfortable with the novelistic legacies of nineteenth-century fictional realism but moving towards formal experimentation, while tuning their work to modernist preoccupations with psychology and sexuality. Their interests aligned in the exploration of female subjectivity and the shifting gender politics of the twentieth century. Lawrence’s landmark novel Women in Love, with its programmatic positioning of two sisters caught between the inherited shapes of English Victorian romance and the pull of a modern European independence, provides a persuasive template for Bowen in her structured pairings of women across several works, including an unpublished story titled ‘Women in Love’. The two writers are linked, finally, by their respective responses to the world at war, with Bowen hailing Lawrence as a guide to her literary navigation of wartime London.

This chapter studies Pablo Neruda’s stay in Buenos Aires in 1933 through an urban perspective. His network is also considered, including Sara Tornú, Norah Lange, Oliverio Girondo, and Federico García Lorca. In a metropolis as cosmopolitan as Buenos Aires was at the beginning of the twentieth century, foreigners could quickly feel at home thanks to the existence of a solid network of sociability that facilitated the integration of the newcomers. For Neruda, who came with the ease that an official position allowed him, it was the possibility of quickly accessing already existing spaces both of expression and recognition, and of sociability (meetings at cafes, private social gatherings, homages). An analysis of Neruda’s urban footprint and his network reveals what a metropolis like Buenos Aires could bring to the intellectuals, especially to Neruda, who was starting then his international career. This urban perspective is thus intended to be a new methodological approach to the study of Pablo Neruda’s works.

Bowen’s letters, novels, and short stories all attest to her love of Italy, a country that she visited often and one where she experienced excitement, love, grief, sorrow, and occasionally boredom. The country provided the location for significant events in her life: the breaking off of an engagement; the shared experiences of a country providing solace when she and her lover, Charles Ritchie, were apart; facing both the potential and actual loss of her family home, Bowen’s Court; or mourning the deaths of Humphry House, her former lover, and her husband, Alan Cameron. Like many of her characters in her novels and short stories, Bowen’s response to, and relationship with, Italy is multi-layered and nuanced, the result of her experiences, both physical and emotional, over many years. This chapter draws on those experiences in Italy, placing Bowen’s writing – in letters, essays, selected early short stories, novels, and her ‘travelogue’, A Time in Rome – within their biographical, bibliographical, and geographical contexts.

This chapter situates Neruda’s early books (Crepusculario and Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada) in contexts that emphasize the legacy of pleasure and self-identification of his work. It attempts to “clear” some of the sins of Neruda by focusing on his poetry as sexually liberating for all parts involved, as a deliberate attempt at going back to a poetics of the flesh. Both Crepusculario and Veinte poemas are adolescent texts that deserve both respect and empathy as testimonies of the survival instinct that impels the young to do great and crazy things, sometimes simultaneously. We must regard Neruda as what he was when he wrote these powerful verses: a teen who self-consciously alternates between a state of revengeful, self-centered alpha-machito and the depths of sadness, solitude, and despair. Each poem, sometimes even each line, encapsulates that most Nerudian and adolescent of tensions: the feeling of uncontrollable power and a feeling of a sadness so deep that it does not even recognize itself except by reading itself from afar.

In most of Elizabeth Bowen’s novels, short stories, and essays published between 1929 and 1949, London never quite registers as the same city from one work to the next. Bowen’s representations of London across her oeuvre are best characterised by their unceasing transformations, ever-morphing geographies, atmospheric shifts, and cosmopolitan bearings. Before she moved to a terrace house on Regent’s Park in 1935 with her husband Alan Cameron, her fiction, like Bowen herself, was London-adjacent. It registers in some of her early work as a city that broadcasts the dull enticements of ancestral obligation. Ingénues in these novels adapt this habit; they gaze at London from afar through the combined lenses of a vivid, though vague, literary imagination and a sluggish cultural legacy, or they conceive of it as a launchpad for a career as an artist. After 1935, and especially after her experiences of London during the blitz, Bowen’s perceptions of the city transform from immobile scenes of social paralysis towards the blistering desire for new, enthralling, and sometimes strange associations.

This essay situates Bowen’s fiction in relation to various early and mid-twentieth-century currents of thought about human sexuality. These include emergent ideas about sexuality and consciousness derived from sexology, Freud, and Nietzsche, along with evolving perspectives on homosexuality and heterosexuality, especially marriage, in intellectual and popular culture. In contemporary literary culture, these ideas were refracted through debates about censorship and modernist arguments for the potential of ‘serious’ literature to enact transformative and even revolutionary changes in consciousness. Bowen’s fiction exhibits an engaged but sceptical perspective on these developments, and this essay maps the various modes through which her novels, with their distinctive style, queer modern sexuality.

In 1934, Pablo Neruda arrived in Barcelona as a Chilean diplomat, and in February 1935, he became the Chilean consul in Madrid. Living in Spain during the Second Republic and the Spanish Civil War marked a turning point in Neruda’s poetry. The Spanish Civil War provoked a historical awakening in Neruda’s poetics – as exemplified in España en el corazón – that paved the way to his ambitious poetic project of Canto general, as he aimed to historicize and politicize his portrayal of Latin American ruins. This essay on how the Spanish Civil War marks Neruda’s poetics examines how the use of the apostrophe throughout España en el corazón reveals the dialogic nature of his poetic project, which intends both to speak to a Republican Spain, with its dead soldiers and poets, and to defy the fascist leaders of the war.

This chapter analyzes Pablo Neruda’s engagement with the English-speaking world. Neruda’s presence made an indelible mark on the cultural spheres in the United States, United Kingdom, and other countries where English is used, notably through his English translations, international travels, and engagement with Anglophone literature. His Nobel Prize in 1971 solidified his status globally, yet his reception in the United States and United Kingdom was affected by Cold War politics. Neruda’s vast literary network, knowledge of Anglophone poetry, and cultural exchanges shaped his impact in the United States and United Kingdom, in particular. Exploring these aspects, supported by the poet’s own memoirs, literary studies, translations, and lasting influence in popular culture, highlights his legacy in the English-speaking realm. Neruda’s intercultural interactions therein emphasize the complex political atmosphere during many major events of the twentieth century in which Neruda played a crucial role and became well-known as both Chile’s greatest poet and a hero for the political Left.

The so-called dispersed Nerudiana, composed of interviews, speeches, prologues, notes, and letters, provides a necessary horizon to rescue, organize, and disseminate. Nerudian letters, in particular, are a privileged source that has not been cataloged or collected in a single corpus. This surprising daily life of a famous writer, a sort of parallel itinerary, lies vast and dispersed in libraries, private archives, and documentary repositories awaiting a systematic effort that allows the long-awaited “deployment of the self-portrait” (à la Boersner), the ultimate goal of historical-literary research. Without his correspondence, in short, his self-portrait is impoverished, leaving room for criticism, speculation, and political dithyramb.

Upon her death in 1973, obituary tributes praised Bowen’s output, without committing to calling her a major writer. Male obituarists cast her a comic writer who supported other writers, without herself being gifted with genius. Yet Bowen’s legacy has grown in the past several decades. John Banville has woven some of Bowen’s themes into his novels – the dilemma of the Anglo-Irish during the Second World War in The Paying Guests and a short radio play called ‘Bowen and Betjeman’ – and Bowen makes a cameo appearance in Ian McEwan’s Atonement. Bowen’s love affair with Charles Ritchie provides the substance of Eibhear Walshe’s novel The Last Day at Bowen’s Court. Yet Bowen’s influence is even more discernible in essays and memoirs by Eavan Boland, Molly Keane, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbara Pym, and A. S. Byatt. As time passes, her relevance increases, and the contexts in which she wrote continue to widen.