Elizabeth Bowen began her career in a period of profound literary upheaval, as some of the most prominent writers of the era attempted to reorient literary fiction away from the social world and towards subjective life. Bowen subscribed to a modernist understanding of literary fiction as fundamentally concerned with investigating and representing the nature of human experience. But if she subscribed to a humdrum humanism that saw little difference between how people experienced the world in the eighteenth century and in the twentieth, she also had an acute sense of the historical variability of writers’ techniques for representing human behaviour. This essay tracks how Bowen’s feelings about modernist modes of experiential description evolved over her career, from her enthusiastic embrace of them in the 1920s to an increased scepticism about their monomaniacal application from the late 1930s onwards – a shift reflected in the changing prominence of stream-of-consciousness styles of writing over her oeuvre. Bowen’s later thematisation of the limits of modernist methods and gradual retreat from them is born not of an aversion to innovation, but of a desire to generate effects that these methods alone are unable to create.

Chapter 7 argues that feminine imagery is the most pervasive strategy in the fifteenth-century Lollard vernacular treatise The Lanterne of Liȝt for encouraging readers to identify affectively with Christ’s true Church while participating in the liturgical, sacramental, and charitable practices of mainstream ecclesiastical life. The chapter identifies a distinctive “ecclesial spirituality” of relating directly to Lady Church in historical circumstances that were hostile and deadly toward religious dissent.

Bowen’s novels and short stories operate through an infrastructure of sound that includes technological conduits such as telephones and radios, as well as material and environmental media that produce, amplify, or distort sound. This sonic infrastructure governs the circulation of information. It also determines who hears what and what gets lost in transmission. Each of Bowen’s works generates a soundscape that embodies its historical and political context. For example, ‘Summer Night’, a short story set in Ireland during the Second World War, amplifies conversations, mechanical noise, and the resonance of domestic spaces as if close-miking the soundscape for bits of information. Instead of being a background element in the texture of her fiction, sound is integral to the construction of her narratives. Sound informs Bowen’s literary style: her writing directs the reader’s ear and, in doing so, demands to be listened to.

In 1967 Pablo Neruda wrote his only play, Fulgor y muerte de Joaquín Murieta, which recreated the popular legend of the Chilean emigrant in “gold rush” California, who ended up becoming a bandit, pursued, and killed by the rangers. With the data collected during his trip to the United States, Neruda wrote his piece with the collaboration of the director Pedro Orthous, a member of the Chilean National Theater and one of the best representatives of political theater in Latin America. Both in the staging and in the text, the influence of Bertolt Brecht, whose work began to be known throughout the world, is discernible, but also that of the political theater written in Spain before and during the Civil War, especially of Fermín Galán, the drama of another communist poet friend of Neruda, Rafael Alberti.

This essay focuses on Pablo Neruda’s politics as seen in his social and historical poetry, much of it having been published after the end of World War II. It concentrates on two collections: Canto general (1950) and España en el corazón (1937), in which one sees the development of a more pronounced political and historicist agenda. The latter text focuses on Spain and specifically on his witnessing of the Spanish Civil War, a conflict that forced him to take sides with the republicanos and the Marxist cause. Later, after the horrors of World War II, he published Canto general, where the Marxist and communist cause becomes fundamental to his poetry, whether it treats the “liberators” of Latin America throughout the centuries, the segregationist United States, or the Soviet Union. In sum, Neruda progressed in the mid-twentieth century into a profoundly committed political poet.

Intertwined with romanticism and his communist political stance, Neruda expresses in multiple lines an ecocritical stance. Animals, landscapes, and the critique of the ideology of progress are found throughout his poetry. This chapter seeks to highlight his contribution within a broad conception of “environmental history.”

Chapter 8 examines a neo-Latin university drama, Christus Triumphans, which was written by the English Protestant John Foxe while he was living in exile during the reign of Mary I, and which depicts Mater Ecclesia (Mother Church) as the mother and schoolmistress of the entire human race. The chapter argues that Foxe uses his dramatic work to forge a diverse community of Continental and English Protestants into the impassioned body of the Church as Christ’s bride, who desires the return of Christ and an end to all tyrannical violence.

This chapter explores Elizabeth Bowen’s career as a literary critic, which is a significant but often overlooked aspect of her writing life. Focusing on her two published essay collections – Collected Impressions (1950) and Afterthought: Pieces about Writing (1962) – as well as a series of uncollected book reviews and articles that appeared in a wide range of British and American newspapers and journals, this chapter examines Bowen’s distinctive approach to criticism and traces the development of her public persona as a critic, particularly from the late 1940s onwards. While it is well documented that Bowen’s prodigious critical output was driven in part by financial necessity, her writing in this domain demonstrates a sensitivity to atmosphere and a deep interest in better understanding the craft of writing. A reviewer who kept the common reader in mind, Bowen above all else conveyed to her readers the sense of being a reasonable judge with varied taste. This chapter assesses Bowen’s enduring critical legacy and argues that her contributions to literary journalism merit sustained attention within the broader histories of twentieth-century criticism.

This essay analyses Elizabeth Bowen’s comedy. It first focuses on the influence of English and Irish comic traditions on Bowen’s humour, especially her debts to Jane Austen and Maria Edgeworth. It then considers the historical and theoretical contexts that inform her comic fiction, written in the shadow of two world wars and a period of conflict and immense change in Ireland, and in the wake of important developments in the theory of humour itself, including interventions by Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud. Bowen’s humour forms an intrinsic part of how she situates herself within literary traditions, and how she engages with themes of class and social tension, cross-cultural encounter and conflict. Bowen’s self-reflexive, ironic style employs modes such as comedy of manners, dark humour, gothic parody, mechanical humour, and satire.

Elizabeth Bowen’s fiction is full of girls; in nearly all her work, she focuses on the act of maturing through adolescence to early adulthood. The experience of girlhood among Bowen’s characters maps onto the generic characteristics of her truncated, ambiguous Bildungsromane, all of which subvert expectations and resist satisfying maturation. Her novels focus on figures experiencing historical and emotional arrest, and her adolescent girls often remain in moments of developmental or social suspension. This essay traces girlhood and adolescence in abeyance in Bowen’s short fiction, and in novels ranging from The Hotel to The Death of the Heart to The Little Girls.

This essay discusses Pablo Neruda’s youth love poetry collection Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada (1924) in relation to situated subjectivities, from decolonial, intersectional feminist perspectives. One hundred years after the collection was published, we briefly account for Neruda’s inter- and intra-subjective exploration of love and otherness. Particular attention is given here to the poetic process as an unending dialogue between production and reception, including some current poetic and nonpoetic canceling, as well as rediscoveries of his rich eco- and geopoetic vocation.

Chapter 9 examines how a range of writers adapted feminine imagery during the English Reformation, including Roman Catholics promoting recusancy, Catholic conformists or “church papists,” Calvinist English clergymen who critiqued puritanism and separatism, and Laudians advocating greater sacramentality and peaceable subordination to monarchical authority. In the new institutional circumstances of early modern England, some Roman Catholics presented Roman Catholicism as a rightful queen and as the only soteriologically efficacious mother, while some Protestants ascribed maternity to the universal Catholic Church alone and depicted all early Churches as her daughters. English Protestants defended the Church of England as a woman whose lap and bosom were open to many loyal lovers.

While a novelist and short story writer may not have been an obvious choice for an appointment to the British Royal Commission on Capital Punishment (1949–53), Elizabeth Bowen’s presence on the commission was vital precisely for those credentials. This essay explores Bowen’s approach to criminality and punishment through her contributions to and commentary on the commission alongside her short fiction from the 1920s to the 1940s. She had been thinking and writing about murder, criminality, and the adjudication and punishment for decades before the commission heard its first testimony. She made two explicit interventions in the outcomes of the report – regarding the status of verbal provocation and the importance placed on marital status in murder cases – but her influence far exceeded those bounds. Bowen’s explorations and understanding of relationships, human temperament, insanity, mental deficiency or abnormality, and circumstance in her stories enhance British legal understanding and practice.

Chapter 10 examines feminizations of the Church in John Donne’s Satyre 3 (“On Religion”) and Holy Sonnet XVIII (“Show me deare Christ, thy Spouse”), assessing how these poems depart from the rhetorical conventions used in defenses of the Church of England from Donne’s milieu. Against claims that the concluding image of Christ’s bride as a promiscuous woman in “Show me deare Christ” is coded Roman Catholic or implies rejection of all earthly Churches, this chapter argues that the poem draws on a long tradition of reading whore-like women as adequate sacraments of Christ’s faithful spouse and reappropriates a slur leveled not only at Roman Catholicism but also at the Church of England, by Catholics and puritans alike.

Chapter 2 examines ecclesiological interpretations of the foremothers of Jesus preserved in a twelfth-century Latin commentary known as Durham Matthew, which survives in a unique manuscript and in a fourteenth-century translation of this commentary into Middle English. The chapter identifies the high ecclesiological principles developed and retained in the genre of continuous biblical commentary, such as Lady Church’s preexistence, incorruptibility, and assumption of incarnate forms in the homiletic and sacramental ministries of ordained men.

Neruda’s temperament was not theoretical, yet several “canonical” poems of his are infused with Marxist thinking. Although there is no evidence that Neruda read Marxist theory, in his thirties he assimilated its totalizing thought from party activism, from his second wife Delia, and from his friend, Spanish poet Rafael Alberti, each a lifelong communist. As an instance, Neruda’s poem “La United Fruit Co.” brings together four types of corporations, economic control of the state, the transportation of product, and subordination of labor. “The Strike” depicts the role of class conflict in the production process. “Cristóbal Miranda (shoveler-Tocopilla)” is one of fifteen portraits of industrial workers focusing on ordinary folk-history-from-below. “Los dictadores,” with its monster engendered by the wealthy autocrat in his palace, demonstrates the functioning of the dialectic in history. Neruda’s Marxism, though more intuitive than discursive, shapes these and other related poems of his.