...Frances Leviston The impact of Elizabeth Bishop’s maternal loss on the symbolic order of her poems is well-established, but the ways in which Bishop draws on literary tradition in exploring that loss have received less attention. This essay offers a close reading of “The Bight” that demonstrates...

... the muchstudied later poems. Where translation is often figured as a process of loss, with a focus on what is “lost in translation,” this essay argues that in Plath’s work it figures too as a way of responding to loss—as a process of mourning. 9 A 1957 letter to her brother has Plath exult in the positive...

... but, rather, a painful process of self-negation. Traversing a world profoundly shaped by colonialism, the writer and his characters are at a loss to make sense of their historical lineage and their place in a rapidly changing landscape. Through a reading of The Loss of El Dorado (1969) and A Bend in the River...

... by Greg Forter Cambridge University Press, 2011. 217 pages Travis Rozier Over the last fifty years or more, the critical discourse on modernism has worked largely under the assumption that the modernist authors who approach the losses of modernity in a melancholic fashion provide the greatest...

... is generally understood as the desire for some idealized lost past, what term can describe the desire to maintain connection with a past that’s known to be problematic? In The Waves Woolf depicts a national attachment marked by an ambivalent sorrow and sense of loss, suggesting that the novel’s...

... of connecting or organically growing something from something else lost, and from our interpretative expectations that such formal connections will compensate this loss of organic connection with a “new” poetic object or body. The tensions in the concept of form (and the emotional compensation associated...

... Djuna Barnes and Katherine IMansfield each wrote a work whose Parisian setting and sexually ambiva­ lent characters provide the backdrop for an inquiry into the convoluted mechanisms of desire and loss. Barnes’s Nightwood, after an initial success boosted by T. S. Eliot’s endorsement...

... itself, the anticipation of accident and loss, disruption and chaos. He is, more­ over, a dispensable condition, as likely a figure for surplus as the throw­ away furnishings of his rented flat. These possessions wound: Leonard cuts himself on Jacky’s picture, the blood “spilling over onto...

... losses do we incur when we’re seldom if ever in rooms with the dead? And how might the virtual spaces of the aesthetic give quarter to the strangeness of the corpse’s demand? Luminous and serious in treating these questions, David Sherman’s In a Strange Room looks at how Anglophone modernism responded...

... not even be addressed, but in whom the speaker finds attachment in a shared wound or loss.1 While such an other in Ashbery’s work never has a proper name— even though his poems are riddled with citations and the voices of others—the occasions of such intimacy often evoke the work...

... the collapsing of such distinctions.7 From the very first page of the novel Frederic suffers from shell shock; his voice is always already the voice of a traumatized survivor of grievous wounds and losses. A “changed man” from the outset, his narrative reveals the continued and unchanging hold that his...

... be consoled by a symbolic substitute, the singularity of the lost person is effaced. Mastering loss in this way thus comes at the cost of apprehending those “unknowable, surprising” aspects of the lost person (130). 3 Such mastery, McHugh’s poems suggest, is no consolation. In three elegies...

..., units of matter in dynamic (chemical or gravitational) interaction.1 The lines demonstrate Merrill’s close identification of mental losses with material ones, and reveal in a rather minimal but clear form Merrill’s absorption of language and imagery from the sciences of the mind. Less clear...

... imperiled and so Twentieth-Century Literature 54.3 Fall 2008 401 Suzette Henke little understood. Beset by unendurable personal losses and overwhelm­ ing cultural trauma, Woolf persisted in the “struggle to forge common values” (32) in a brave new world whose “now global public” was being...

... to recuperate Barnes for the important politics of lesbian literary history than to approach the novel from Nora’s position, that of a woman remembering loss. Carolyn Allen traces the influence of Barnes’s pioneering representation of complex lesbian intersubjectivity on more recent lesbian novelists...

... that “the ‘One Art’ of the modern elegy is not transcendence or redemption of loss but immersion in it” (4). If the final version of “North Haven” depicts Bishop immersed in loss, it does so because Bishop herself had moved beyond the loss through the art of writing; her drafts trace...

... crossings between past and present, crossings that, like the passing of time figured by the back and forth motion of a clock’s pendulum, are both destructive and creative, both honest about time’s losses and wishing to make gains of them. The poem’s form is symmetri­ cal, taking an hourglass...

..., overwork, and disease” (2). Loss of this magnitude feels beyond apprehension, but Schlund-Vials eloquently points out that the emotional and material labor of Cambodian American artists in confronting their traumatic history provides necessary alternatives to official practices of selective remembrance...

... it, for “the significance of the African oral tradition amid a backdrop of undeniable, though not always debilitating, European cultural hegemony” (5). 2 Viewed through this lens, the Corregidora women combat not the loss of history but the waning of its emotional authenticity, which looms whenever the only remaining...

... devastating personal loss while flying his plane, so that he lands, presumably once and for all, and retreats into the bosom of his home, seemingly fulfilling Gray’s damning accusation that the post-9/11 novel reduces “a turning point in national and international history to little more than a stage...