As one of the most prolific poets of twentieth-century Hispanic literature, Pablo Neruda’s influence affected diverse cultural and sociopolitical environments. His literary creation and participation in the public sphere led to the poet receiving prizes and awards of both modest and spectacular prestige. While some of Neruda’s awards prompted political controversies that revealed the peculiarities of his character, all of these honors extended his prominence as Chile’s chief poet in the World Republic of Letters. The acquisition of coveted international recognition was, however, of secondary importance to Neruda: His greatest achievement was his own people’s understanding and emotional identification with his poetry.

In June 1966, the International PEN Club held its annual conference in New York City. It was the first time in forty-two years that the United States had hosted the meeting, and there was much to celebrate. Pablo Neruda, who had repeatedly been denied visas to the United States since 1943 on the grounds that he was a communist, was one of the stars of the show. Throughout – and, indeed, long after – the conference, he made headlines, drew audiences, and made statements that had a lasting impact. He also earned the wrath of supporters of the Cuban Revolution, who attacked him for betraying the revolution by participating in the conference. This chapter discusses Neruda’s participation in the event, including the controversies that he sparked during and afterward, as well as his other activities in New York and his travels in the United States afterward.

In 1937, Graham Greene recruited Bowen to write theatre reviews for Night and Day, his short-lived journal. Throughout her career, Bowen thought about and wrote dramas for radio and the stage. In the 1940s, she wrote several short dramatic features for BBC radio with an emphasis on dialogue: one about Frances Burney, another about Jane Austen, a short play called ‘The Confidante’??IN TEXT ’The Confidant’, and an autobiographical piece called ‘A Year I Remember – 1918’. Castle Anna, a play that Bowen co-authored with John Perry, received indifferent notices when it was staged in February 1948. She also wrote a pageant on the history of Kinsale and a ‘Nativity Play’. As much as she was drawn to theatre, Bowen’s strength lay in writing for the ear rather than the eye.

Identifying the principles of ecclesiological interpretation that John Wyclif applies to all biblical feminine imagery in his Tractatus de Ecclesia (De Ecclesia), Chapter 4 shows how Wyclif uses biblical materials to provide Lady Church with a narrative arc and a speaking part in the drama of salvation history.

This chapter traces the personal and literary relationship between Elizabeth Bowen and the American writer Eudora Welty from their first meeting in 1950 until Bowen’s death in 1973. Letters reveal that the two writers, feeling a connection between their respective ‘souths’, Cork and Mississippi, found common ground in fiction and friendship. They travelled together and frequently commented on each other’s work in progress. Using archival records and extant correspondence, this chapter focuses on their travels together in 1951, when Bowen was lecturing in the American South. Bowen’s reception by women’s clubs and other female literary networks illustrates her literary status at mid-century while revealing the informal networking and paraliterary labour required for independent women to make a living by writing.

Across her fiction and non-fiction, Elizabeth Bowen is consistently intrigued by hotels. From the grand Italian Riviera establishment of her debut novel, The Hotel, to the series of dingy ‘back rooms in hotels … with no view’ occupied by Portia Quayne and her mother in The Death of the Heart, many of Bowen’s characters occupy, however briefly, the transitory, impermanent space of the hotel. Although characters move through hotel space, they are never left unmarked by it. Portia’s teacher observes her ‘hotel habits’, which she cannot shake. This chapter explores Bowen’s preoccupation with the space of the hotel in her writing, and demonstrates her acute sense not only of its unique spatiality, but also of the intricacies of hotel temporality. More specifically, I argue that Bowen is a writer who is profoundly sensitive to the relationship between people and the spaces they occupy, and this sensitivity comes to the fore in the hotel phenomenologies of her characters.

The book ends with a review of the long and complex history of feminine imagery for the Church and presents major conclusions from the book’s case studies, such as the remarkable and previously unrecognized continuities and changes across the periodization divide established by the English Reformation. The Conclusion also reviews the analytical method used in the book’s case studies – which is adaptable to feminine imagery for the Church in sources outside the book’s scope – and evaluates the aptitude of the term “goddess” for Lady Church in the context of comparative religious studies.

This chapter explores the cultural reception of Pablo Neruda in China and Japan. Between 1949 and 1979, Neruda was among the most translated foreign writers in China, playing an essential role as a cultural diplomat for the Chinese government. In addition, he established a friendship with the poet Ai Qing (1910–1996), and their memory is still remembered through Ai Qing’s son Ai Weiwei (1957–), one of the most famous Chinese artists and activists today. Compared with his popularity in China, Neruda never received much critical attention in Japan. After World War II, the US occupation forced Japan to unwillingly become the centerpiece for America’s Cold War strategy in East Asia. Although the country never embraced communism as a significant political force, the essay argues that contemporary Japanese artists such as Taeko Tomiyama (1921–2021) and Nobu Takehisa (1940–) found inspiration in Neruda’s work regarding literature, art, politics, and nature in Latin America.

The history of development and structure of various musical compositions and adaptations from 1969 onward of aspects of Pablo Neruda’s Canto general is examined in three exemplary cases: Aparcoa’s “musical poetic work,” first performed in 1970; the Canto general oratorio composed in 1972–80 by Greek composer Mikis Theodorakis; and the “Alturas” (“Heights of Macchu Picchu”) work by Los Jaivas, composed in 1980–81. These musical compositions and adaptations, as well as their performance, broaden out the ways in which new generations interpret and frame Neruda’s life and works. They are also aspects of Neruda’s “cultural afterlife,” while being new creations, as words, within the sphere of music.

In ‘Notes on Writing a Novel’, Elizabeth Bowen addresses the visual angle an author may choose to adopt as a problem in writerly technique: ‘Where is the camera-eye to be located?’ As she was a self-described ‘visual writer’, it follows that an exploration of her visuality offers a useful lens to perceive her work. Talk of lenses leads to thoughts of eyes, glasses, and photography, all of which feature prominently in her fiction. Bowen’s visuality also manifests itself across technical, aesthetic, and thematic levels, through linguistic choice, and in the rendering of perception. Through a selection of novels and short stories, this essay considers Bowen’s visuality under two lens-based categories – the human ‘roving eye’ and the photograph, index of the mechanical ‘camera eye’ – in an effort to apprehend, at least in part, her literary focus, and how she registers, records, and frames impressions and experiences.

Bowen was not a committed feminist, but she did have a proximity to feminist thinkers and a belief in women’s civic responsibility. She insists in her essay, ‘Woman’s Place in the Affairs of Man’, ‘I am not, and never shall be, a feminist.’ A less strident formulation in Bowen’s first novel seems to better capture the ambiguous but affectionate character of Bowen’s attitude towards women throughout her oeuvre: ‘I am not a Feminist’, says Mrs Kerr in The Hotel, ‘but I do like being a woman’. Bowen certainly liked being and being with women, both in her life and in her writing. She was an acute social, sometimes sociological, observer of women and of their relationships to one another, sometimes in ways that echo and anticipate the insights of feminist thinkers. This chapter focuses Bowen’s observations about women in her essays before moving on to her penultimate novel, The Little Girls.

This chapter examines Elizabeth Bowen’s relationship to audiovisual art forms. Given Bowen’s own relative lack of interest in film, one may wonder why adaptation should be included in an overall analysis of her work and its impact. One argument is largely commercial: be it through television, film, or radio, dramatisations of Bowen’s works contribute to increased public scrutiny of her fiction. For those already familiar with Bowen’s fiction, adaptations revitalise readings of her fiction. How her texts correspond to traditions and tropes of other media tells us much about the interplay of genres – from novel of manners and social satire to spy story or historical fiction – as they manifest themselves in the traditions of those media. Ultimately, an adaptation is also an interpretation and analysis of its source text. This examination of adaptations focuses on The Last September and The Heat of the Day, two of Bowen’s most-read works. These adaptations are the best known and most accessible audiovisual adaptations of her fiction.