Imperial Refugee: Olivia Manning's Fictions of War by Eve Patten from Trinity College, Dublin is published by Cork University Press today.
Olivia Manning (1908-1980) had a reputation as a difficult personality and this has threatened to obscure her reputation as a writer. The book aims to recover Manning’s place as a pre-eminent novelist of British wartime experience. Manning belonged to a British literary generation which held tenaciously to its diverse Irish connections in the wartime years, but, as with Cyril Connolly or Lawrence Durrell, her claims on Irishness were intermittent and often distinctly pragmatic.
The book deals in depth with a diverse range of biographical, historical and literary detail. It examines the troubled interface between public and domestic narratives” and the ways in which Manning developed, through her experiences of living in Romania, Athens, Egypt and Jerusalem, her creative methods of politicising the refugee experience. As well as looking at Manning’s novels within their diverse settings the book also examines the varied literary modes Manning deploys and adapts – the gothic, autobiography and writing the self, the serial novel, the wartime and epic and more.
This full-length study will be of great interest to scholars of modern British literary and cultural history’, with relevance for students of postcolonial and transnational studies, the ‘Middlebrow’ and the Second World War period.
The author is Eve Patten who is Associate Professor in the School of English, Trinity College Dublin.
May 2012 ISBN 978-185918-482-0, €39, £35, Hardback, 234 x 156mm, 242pp
http://corkuniversitypress.com/Imperial_Refugee:_Olivia_Manning’s_Fictions_of_War/359/
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