Death and the nonhuman in Elizabeth Bowen's Fiction

Abstract

The Renaissance and the Enlightenment, revolutions in ‘Western’ thought, asserted the superiority of humanist, rationalist modes of engaging with and understanding the phenomenal world over traditional technologies of knowledge. Beginning in the early modern era, emerging models of scientific inquiry seemed to demonstrate the independence of the human mind from its physical environment, in contrast to older, ‘primitive’ systems of organizing phenomena and relationships between them that understood every element of the environment, including the animate, the numinous and the inanimate, as parts of an enmeshed whole. One of the promises held out by Enlightenment thought, then, was the possibility of transcending the body, associated with the mortal limitations of our animal materiality, ‘the living link between an artificially idealized humanity and “nature” ’. The artistic avant-garde of the early twentieth century reacted against Enlightenment imperatives to progress and civilization in its preoccupation with ‘primitive’ forms, from the aesthetic...