From experiments in language and identity to innovations in the novel, the short story and life narratives, the contributors discuss the ways in which Bowen's work straddles, informs and defies the existing definitions of modernist and postmodernist literature which dominate twentieth-century writing. The eleven chapters present new scholarship on Bowen's inventiveness and unique writing style and its attachment to objects, covering topics such as queer adolescents, housekeeping, female fetishism, habit and new technologies such as the telephone.