This article explores the Modernist life narrative in the context of interwar citizenship policies that exposed women to an increased risk of statelessness on both sides of the Atlantic. Read together, Agnes Smedley’s Daughter of Earth (1929) and Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938) bring this transnational context into view. While access to rights may indicate the ideal endpoint of subject-formation in the traditional Bildungsroman , Woolf and Smedley demonstrate how women’s access to rights comes at the cost of nonnormative desire. Their works use a rhetoric of incivility to mark emergent agencies within and alongside formal structures of citizenship.
The role of landscape in Elizabeth Bowen’s Irish novels has been overshadowed by the critical emphasis on her representations of the Anglo-Irish big house. In contrast to this critical trend, this article argues that Bowen’s Irish landscapes stage questions of national identity and postcoloniality pervading mid-twentieth-century Irish culture and politics through negative epic forms, forms that reconfigure both realist and modernist conventions. In The Last September, landscape description reframes the scope of epic conventions and challenges narratives of geopolitical development, while in A World of Love, a late modern picturesque interrupts the romantic emplotment of Ireland’s entry into global capitalist networks.
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