Elizabeth Bowen’s Grammar of Waning Empire

Abstract: This essay theorizes a connection between referential instability and British imperial collapse in Elizabeth Bowen’s novel The Last September . It argues that the felt experiences of the rapidly shifting historical situation in Ireland must be understood through the novel’s linguistic indirection. By tracing the development of “enabling generalizations,” it shows how the novel’s dialogic language exposes the unstable nature of colonial identification—evidenced in the volatility of setting—while offering a formal strategy for grappling with that very instability.