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This article discusses Elizabeth Bowen's appropriation of a traditionally male-addressed literary genre, namely, of what Elaine Showalter has termed "male romance," which Bowen radically reformulates in order to foreground the complexity of female subjectivity and sexuality against a backdrop of war. In her short story "Mysterious Kôr" (1945), Bowen both draws and departs from Henry Rider Haggard's prototypical male romance She: A History of Adventure (1887) not only by intertextually incorporating Haggard's literary landscape in her story, but also by inserting contemporary assessments of Haggard's novel -most notably those of his friend and admirer Andrew Lang in his sonnet "She" (1888). Like Haggard and Lang, Bowen produced "Mysterious Kôr" in years marked by a profound sense of crisis and disenchantment which, in Bowen's case, was enhanced by the horrors of the Blitz War in London. Haggard, Lang, and Bowen articulate their respective narratives as a literary response to such disenchantment, shaped as a quest-myth of 're-enchantment' which departs from a civilization on the verge of collapse to a mythical destination. However, Bowen is also careful in articulating difference from Haggard's male narrative and Lang's appreciation of it: Departing from many of these writers' literary motifs, Bowen produces a female version of an imaginative escape which entails a woman's experience of war, and her mental strategies to preserve sanity.

In 1934, Argentinian editor and writer Victoria Ocampo commissioned Jorge Luis Borges the translations of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Orlando, to be published in 1935 and 1937, respectively, under the auspices of the intellectual circle ‘Sur’ (‘South’). These translations would inspire generations of writers, appealed by Woolf’s subversive strategies to trespass physical and psychological boundaries, and by her innovative conception of time, history, and gender, which anticipated what came to be later known as ‘magic realism’. This essay explores the ways in which Woolf’s influence affects the construction of alternative ontological realms that both coexist with and transcend identifiable historical sites in the work of Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel García Márquez, William Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Michèle Roberts, and Jeanette Winterson. The chapter further examines the different strategies these writers use to unsettle received assumptions pertaining to history and to propose alternative rewritings of it in Woolf’s wake.

This article aims at critically examining the contemporary urge to overcome taboos, silence and amnesia both in private and public history as a result of participation in the “Great War” in order to exorcise the transgenerational phantom which continues to haunt the present. To do so, I here examine two contemporary short stories published in the wake of centennial commemorations of the Great War in 2014, Sheena Wilkinson’s “Each Slow Dusk” and Xiaolu Guo’s “Coolies”. These stories articulate from different angles and perspectives women’s necessity to settle accounts with their own family history and with a traumatic inheritance which has been silenced. Unlike many war veterans whose participation in the war was acknowledged by proper mourning and public rituals, the protagonists of Guo and Wilkinson’s stories were deprived of recognition and their participation was silenced within the family and by official amnesia. The political position of Northern Ireland as part of the British Empire is overtly explored in Wilkinson’s depiction of the country’s adherence to the First World War in her short story “Each Slow Dusk”, where the protagonist sees her dreams of entering Queen’s College in Belfast abruptly put to an end when her shell-socked brother returns from the Somme in 1916. In “Coolies”, British-Chinese writer Xiaolu Guo brings to the fore the participation of 100,000 Chinese peasants– or kulis – recruited by the British army to dig European trenches, addressing a topic which already challenges received conceptions of the conflict as a European drama.