Imperial refugee : Olivia Manning's fictions of war / Eve Patten.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Patten, Eve.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Manning, Olivia--Criticism and interpretation.

Manning, Olivia.

World War, 1939-1945--Literature and the war.

World War, 1939-1945.

Criticism and interpretation.

Physical Description:

234 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Cork : Cork University Press, 2011.

Summary:

Olivia Manning (1908-1980), author of the Balkan and Levant trilogies (later Known as the Fortunes of War sequence), was a leading chroniclear of Britain's experiences abroad during the Second World War. This book explores her work in the context of 1939 and its aftermath in order to recover the rich contribution she made to the fiction that emerged from the conflict. Beginning with her Irish connections, it traces her extraordinary wartime journey from London to Bucharest, Athens, Cairo and finally, Jerusalem, and reconstructs in detail the historical, political and social landscapes of her novels. The study also charts Manning's relationships with various fellow writters, from Stevie Smith and Evelyn Waugh to Elizabeth Bowen, Arthur Koestler and Lawrence Durrell, painting an intricate portrait of British and Irish expatriate literary culture in the war years and the decade that followed.

Interest in the literature of the Second World War has grown significantly over the past twenty years and this - the first full-length study of Olivia Manning's writing - will be of great interest to scholars and cultural historians of the period. In considering her creative affiliations to genres such as autobiography, the gothic, and the epic sequence novel, it offers new material to critics of literary inter-modernism and the 'middlebrow', and in drawing attention to her subtle representations of the 'refugee', it negotiates a defining political theme. Reading from a wide range of literary, historical, journalistic and biographical sources, this book illuminates the life of a neglected figure and restores to view one of the major authors of twentieth-century prose fiction. Book jacket.

Contents:

Chapter 1 A Life in Writing 11

Chapter 2 The Balkan Trilogy: Romania and the Far end of Europe 47

Chapter 3 From Athens to Alexandria: The Contexts of Personal Landscape 79

Chapter 4 Egypt, The Desert War and the leavant Trilogy 111

Chapter 5 'John Bull's Other Ireland': Manning's Plestine Fiction 143.

ISBN:

9781859184820

1859184820

OCLC:

766340331