Reviews

Review: Allan Hepburn, ed. Listening In: Broadcasts, Speeches and Interviews by Elizabeth Bowen (2010)

 

Allan Hepburn, editor. Listening In: Broadcasts, Speeches, and Interviews by Elizabeth Bowen. Edinburgh:  Edinburgh University Press, 2010. 381 pp. $135, cloth; $45, paper.

Abstract

Allan Hepburn’s new collection of Elizabeth Bowen’s radio broadcasts, speeches and interviews, Listening In, importantly extends Bowen’s cultural and intellectual range to that of a public intellectual. Though known mainly as a writer of short stories and novels, this collection of her BBC broadcasts (1941-1973) reveals her engagement with the spoken voice, the new media and her times.

If Elizabeth Bowen is a writer with whom we have to “catch up,”[i] Allan Hepburn’s recent collections of her unpublished work will help us along that path.

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Review of Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes: Chinese critic

“Beyond the Little Red Book: Literature in China Today”

Sept. 4-11, 2001, 31-37
Since literature and politics are intertwined in China, writing has been organized in ways unfamiliar in the West. The Department of Propaganda of the CCP Central Committee exercises control over the national writers’ union and local writers’ unions. The national Chinese Union of Writers has a branch in each province. Deng Youmei, an elected officer of the Beijing Writers’ Union, said in an interview with the author in March that the Chinese Union of Writers currently has about 5,000 members, including novelists, translators, playwrights, poets and critics, 80 percent of whom were admitted after the Cultural Revolution.