Bowen's writing is well recognised for its preoccupation with the cinema, and its cinematic techniques, leading recent criticism to align her writing with the experimentations and innovations of literary modernism. As a result Bowen's cinema writing has been read after modernism, and, in particular, after Virginia Woolf. Through a close reading of Bowen's critically neglected 1929 cinema short story ‘Dead Mabelle’, however, I show how Bowen is not simply writing in the wake of Woolf's cinema aesthetics, but in dialogue with them. Although similarly preoccupied with the cinema affects - or emotion pictures- that fund Woolf's writing, Bowen's story highlights the philosophic blind spots on which these aesthetics turn. Rather than agree with modernist aesthetics, 'Dead Mabelle' offers a critical counterpoint to modernist writing about the cinema that deconstructs the very discourses with which her work has been aligned
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.