"In a Room": Elizabeth Bishop in Europe, 1935–1937
We do not always remember that Elizabeth Bishop came of age as a writer during the rise of fascism, and that she composed a number of the poems for her first collection, North & South (1946), in Europe, as the Continent consciously prepared for world war. One reason we do not often connect her early work to such dramatic historical context is the late date of her first book: her poems had been appearing in major magazines for a decade when North & South was published. While a few scholars, notably James Longenbach and Betsy Erkkila, have begun to consider Bishop's early poetry within the political context of the 1930s, and to "locat[e] Bishop's work within the debates about the relation between literary modernism and the American and international Left[,]" the tendency of many critics has been to focus on what seem to be the purely aesthetic, apparently surrealist elements in Bishop's writing from the '30s and '40s, and to characterize her later work in Brazil, from the '50s and '60s, as a political awakening (Erkkila 285).1 At the same time, insightful biographical and psychoanalytic studies of her work sometimes downplay or overlook the impact of the larger, dramatic historical context in which she was writing her early poems.2 Here I want to consider more deeply the influence, on Bishop's early work, of the year and a half she spent in Europe shortly after college from July of 1935 to June of 1936, and from June to December of 1937 and to attend to the startling ways that three of her strange, early poems register contemporary anxieties about the development of fascism and militarism in Germany and Italy, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, and Italy's invasion of Ethiopia. Bishop's work has always resisted easy categorization, and it has been subject frequently to ahistorical readings. Bishop can be aptly discussed as a postmodernist poet, yet her early work can be considered late modernist; the aesthetic-political dilemmas of late modernism in the '30s were
The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Bishop
Introduction Angus Cleghorn and Jonathan Ellis Part I. Contexts and Issues: 1. Bishop and biography Thomas Travisano 2. Bishop, history, and politics Steven Gould Axelrod 3. Bishop: race, class, and gender Kirstin Hotelling Zona 4. Bishop and the natural world Susan Rosenbaum 5. Bishop and the poetic tradition Bonnie Costello Part II. Major Works: 6. In the village: Bishop and Nova Scotia Sandra Barry 7. Becoming a poet: from north to south Bethany Hicok 8. Home, wherever that may be: poems and prose of Brazil Barbara Page 9. Back to Boston: Geography III and other late poems Lloyd Schwartz 10. Bishop's correspondence Siobhan Phillips 11. Bishop and visual art Peggy Samuels 12. Bishop's posthumous publications Lorrie Goldensohn Bibliography and guide to further reading Index.
Socially responsible enterprise in Cuba: a positive role model for Corporate Social Responsibility?’
This article examines the unique institutional environment of socialist Cuba, where currently a process of controlled marketization and expansion of private enterprise is taking place. The article investigates business behaviour in Cuba with particular reference to implicit assumptions relating to socially responsible enterprise, or Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) as the term is understood in Western Liberal Democracies. It draws upon a series of interviews with business practitioners and business commentators (both Cuban and non-Cuban residents on the island). The interviews focused on the participants’ awareness of business ethics and socially responsible enterprise, and the cultural differences in assumptions and expectations relating to the concept of CSR between the Cuban and non-Cuban interviewees. We find that Cuba at this early stage of tentative marketization presents a positive role model of socially responsible enterprise. Both the highly regulated State economy and the embedded norms and values of social equity that have emerged as a consequence of Cuba’s socialist revolution facilitate business social responsibility. The relevance of this research to current debates in relation to CSR is discussed and it is argued that capitalist economies may similarly benefit from tighter regulatory control and by cultivating more pro-social business norms that prioritise ethical over economic concerns.