Scholarly Works

Primary Research Interests

Twentieth-century English, Irish, and Anglo-Irish literature (writers of the Irish Renaissance and Irish Revival, women writers, early twentieth-century aesthetic and philosophical movements, theories of representation and reading practices, genre hybridity, rhetorical hermeneutics, psychoanalytic theory) and creative writing (theory, pedagogy, gender, cultural practices)

Recent Works

Elizabeth Bowen: New Critical Perspectives

(Editor and Contributor)

From the Introduction:

In her essay, ‘“How to measure this unaccountable darkness between the trees”: the strange relation of style and meaning in The Last September", Osborn examines one of Bowen’s early novels, one most often read as a realistic novel concerned with the conflagration caused by Britain’s division of Ireland in 1920. However, Osborn examines some of the ways that Bowen’s troublesome and problematic stylistic irregularities undermine the ideological work represented as being achieved in such readings, and suggests instead that the novel’s most affecting dramas and the distinctive strain involved in interpreting this novel’s protean allure result in large measure from the provocative and disordered ways that the prose violates rules of mimetic representation and realistic discourse while establishing a relationship with them. Where there are departures from the commonplace, the expected sites of agreed-upon meanings, there occur interpretive challenges, but, as Osborn contends, much of the interest of The Last September, and of Bowen’s fictional narratives generally, lies in the ways that Bowen acknowledges these problems not in terms of reductive psychological categories, but by the way her representation estranges commonly conceived and represented relations among the ‘real’ and the ‘fictional’, the phenomenal and the noumenal, and by the ways she sometimes but not always disjoins the imbricated real thus produced from the social context of practical knowledge. By so doing, Bowen produces a novel that is driven as much by the epistemological suspensions that are formed among reader and text as it is by the action represented as occurring in the narrative’s manifest plot.

Table of Contents:
  • Introduction - Susan Osborn
  • Unstable compounds: Bowen’s Beckettian affinities - Sinéad Mooney
  • ‘How to measure this unaccountable darkness between the trees’: the strange relation of style and meaning in The Last September - Susan Osborn
  • Dead letters and living things: historical ethics in The House in Paris and The Death of the Heart - Eluned Summers-Bremner
  • Mumbo-jumbo: the haunted world of The Little Girls - June Sturrock
  • ‘She-ward bound’: Elizabeth Bowen as a sensationalist writer - Shannon Wells-Lassagne
  • Territory, space, modernity: Elizabeth Bowen’s The Demon Lover and Other Stories and wartime London - Shafquat Towheed
Published by Cork University Press
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Selected Works and Service

Selected Articles:

“Elizabeth Bowen: New Directions for Critical Thinking,” Modern Fiction Studies, Summer 2007.
“Reconsidering Elizabeth Bowen,” Modern Fiction Studies, Spring 2006.
“‘Revision/Re-Vision:’ A Feminist Writing Class,” Rhetoric Review, Spring 1991.
“What Helen Gurley Brown Taught Me About Teaching Basic Writing,” Writer’s Craft, Teacher’s Art: Teaching What We Know, ed. Mimi Schwartz; Boynton Cook/Heinemann 1991.
“Rhetorical Strategies of Women Student Writers,” Praxis, Spring/Summer 1987.
“Doris Lessing,” The 60s Without Apology, eds. Sohnya Sayres, Anders Stephanson, Stanley Aronowitz, Fredric Jameson; University of Minnesota Press 1984.

Selected Papers:

“‘This Pointless Verbal Excess’*: A Reconsideration of Bowen’s Stylistic Tics',” “‘A Mixture of Showing off and Suspicion, Nearly as Bad as Sex’: Reading Elizabeth Bowen,” Symposium, University of Sussex, 2009.
“The Common Model of the Creative Writing Process and an Exercise in Self-Conscious Revision,” The Association of Writers & Writing Programs Conference, 2008.
“‘Out of the Distance Everywhere, Space Came Like Water’: Decoding Elizabeth Bowen’s Modernism,” Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture Conference, 2006.
“‘How to Measure the Unaccountable Darkness Between the Trees’: The Strange Relation of Style and Meaning in Elizabeth Bowen’s Fiction,” Modern Language Association Convention, 2005.
“Imagining Ireland: Reading Elizabeth Bowen’s Landscapes,” invited lecture, Princeton Research Forum, 2005.
“Contemporary American Fiction: Styles of Engagement,” Universität Basel, 1999.
“Revision/Re-Vision: The Connection,” Conference on College Composition and Communication, 1990.
“Revisioning the Argument,” New Jersey Research Conference on Women, Douglass College, 1989.

Essays, Book Reviews, & Articles Published In:

Modern Fiction Studies, Literature & History, The Irish Literary Supplement, Rhetoric Review, The American Scholar, Praxis, The New York Times, The Village Voice, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Chicago Sun-Times, Newsday, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Publishers Weekly, Vassar Quarterly, Kirkus Reviews, In These Times, Womanews, Princeton Packet, Garden Design, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Examiner, American Book Review, Louisville Courier- Journal, Country Living, Trenton Times, Belles Lettres, New Jersey Life, Sojourner, Isthmus, Mothering, New York Arts Weekly, WORT-FM (Madison, WI)

Academic, Professional, & Administrative Experience:

Judge, National Society of Arts and Letters Literature Competition, 2010
Guest editor, Modern Fiction Studies, Summer 2007 (issue devoted to the work of Elizabeth Bowen)
Designed and implemented curriculum for advanced creative writing students, Rutgers University, 2007-2009
Seminar organizer and presenter, The College of New Jersey’s Writers’ Conference, 2001, 1996
Judge, Paterson Fiction Prize, 1996
New Jersey Center for Research on Writing, 1986, 1987
  • Researched and developed pedagogy for teaching writing as revision
  • Developed, organized, and presented series of traveling teacher-training seminars
  • Coordinated programs between center and colleges and universities
Organizer, Bedford Prizes in Student Writing, Bedford Books, 1986, 1987
Co-coordinator, Women’s Studies Conference, SUNY/New Paltz, 1984
Senior Editor, reference, scholarly, and trade nonfiction divisions, The Philip Lief Group, Inc., 1982-present
  • Conceive and develop book ideas
  • Coordinate and oversee all aspects of editorial production
  • Write, rewrite, and edit manuscripts, promotional materials, and website copy
  • Act as liaison between staff and freelancers
  • Develop and execute marketing plans
  • Clients include New York University Press, Glucksman Ireland House, Facts On File, Inc., John Wiley & Sons, National Women’s History Project, Civil War Society, Grolier Educational Corporation, American Medical Women’s Association, National Association of School Psychologists, GlaxoSmithKline
  • Website content development and design
Freelance Editor
  • Clients include The Smithsonian Institution, W. W. Norton & Co., American Society for Reproductive Medicine, Penguin Group USA, Philadelphia Child Guidance Clinic, 1978-present
Freelance Writer
  • Published with McGraw-Hill; Pantheon; Perigee Books; William Morrow & Co.; Holt, Rinehart and Winston; HarperCollins; The Crown Publishing Group
Books Editor, Vassar Quarterly, 1978-1985