Elizabeth von Arnim: Beyond the German Garden

ISBN-13: 9781409411673 / Angielski / Twarda / 2013 / 304 str.

Isobel Maddison

Opis

In the first book-length treatment of Elizabeth von Arnim's fiction, Isobel Maddison examines her work in its historical and intellectual contexts, demonstrating that von Arnim's fine comic writing and complex and compelling narrative style reward close analysis. Organised chronologically and thematically, Maddison's book is informed by unpublished material from the British and Huntington Libraries, including correspondence between von Arnim, her publishers and prominent contemporaries such as H.G. Wells, Bertrand Russell and her cousin Katherine Mansfield -- whose early modernist prose is seen as indebted to von Arnim's earlier literary influence. Maddison's exploration of the novelist's critical reception is situated within recent discussions of the middlebrow and establishes von Arnim as a serious author among her intellectual milieu, countering the misinformed belief that the author of such novels as Elizabeth and Her German Garden, The Caravaners, The Pastor's Wife and Vera wrote light-hearted fiction removed from gritty reality. On the contrary, various strands of socialist thought and von Arnim's wider political beliefs establish her as a significant author of British anti-invasion literature while weighty social issues underpin much of her later writing."

Spis treści

Introduction ‘Artful Necklaces'; 1: ‘Scourgers and Scavengers of Society': Elizabeth von Arnim and the Critics; 2: The ‘German' Novels: Elizabeth and Her German Garden, The Solitary Summer and Christine; 3: ‘Worms of the Same Family': Elizabeth von Arnim and Katherine Mansfield; 4: Revenge, Lampoon and Litigation: Vera; 5: Love, Marriage, Expiation; 6: An Afterlife in Moving Images: The Enchanted April and Mr Skeffington; Afterword

O autorze

Isobel Maddison is Fellow, College Lecturer and Director of Studies in English at Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge, where she works on female modernism and the connections between popular and modernist literature.