Elizabeth Bowen's Critical "Scrap Screen".

Elizabeth Bowen's Collected Impressions (1950), out of print since soon after its initial appearance , has been wrongly disregarded by Bowen's readers and critics. The volume, comprising over fifty pieces of criticism, models Bowen's distinctive critical process—a process that is characterized by self-reflection, by deliberate and artful arrangement of her essays, and by her strategic revisionary return to a decade's worth of her nonfiction. Archival research at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin reveals that Bowen develops a "scrap screen" approach to writing criticism in an effort to make of her literary impressions something permanent. Besides re-envisioning nostalgia as part of her critical process, Bowen composes a text that serves as a unifying record of her development as a literary critic, despite her self-doubt regarding her legacy as a critic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]