"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 Collected Prose
These short stories are designed to form a companion to Elizabeth Bishop's collected poems. They reflect life, characters and manners in the American rural maritime community where the writer grew up. In addition there are some travel pieces and a variety of memoirs.
Violence at Work
Part 1 Understanding violence at work: introduction - a catalyst for action patterns and trends explanations. Part 2 Responding to violence at work: legislative and regulatory interventions guidelines and best practice international action. Part 3 Future guidance: beyond violence - lessons for future action.