‘The Road Was in Ireland’: Modernist Ecologies of Estrangement in Elizabeth Bowen’s Short Fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Attending to Elizabeth Bowen’s environmental descriptions in her short fiction, including her landscapes, weather, flora, and fauna, reveals a modernist ecological sensibility. In stories such as ‘Summer Night’ and ‘Human Habitation,’ Bowen’s characters find themselves estranged from the kinds of attachment to place fostered by a national ecological imaginary. While Bowen’s own nationality, and the effect of her Anglo-Irish class and heritage on her writing, has been a central area of consideration for many scholars, this essay offers an ecocritical reading of her short stories and argues that these works interrogate the viability of national ecologies to help understand the experiences of her characters within a modern world. Whether they find themselves in Ireland or in England, Bowen’s characters inhabit a world that perpetually leads to feelings of detachment and alienation from the terms of belonging and place that underlie such national ecologies. By building on the recent modernist and ecocritical turn in scholarship on Elizabeth Bowen, this essay argues that her short stories challenge the explanatory qualities of romantic national ecologies by instead evoking a modernist ecology of estrangement.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.033 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".