The weight of being herself fell on her like clock striking. She saw clothes she would put on to go home in hanging over chair. While it is still Before, Afterwards has no power, but afterwards it is kingdom, power and glory. ... What [my family] can never know will soon never have been. ... I shall die like Aunt Violet wondering what else there was; from this there is no escape for me after all. She must rely on marriage to carry her somewhere else. Till it did, she stayed bound to gone moment, like stopped clock with hands silently pointing at an hour it can not be. --Elizabeth Bowen, The House in Paris (133-34) Looking down, it seemed to Lois they lived in forest; space of lawns blotted out in pressure and dusk of trees. She wondered they were not smothered ... Far from here, too, their isolation became apparent ... till far hills, taint and brittle, straining against inrush of vaster distance, cut droop of sky like glass blade. --Elizabeth Bowen, The Last September (92) Elizabeth Bowen's prose offers compelling, often perplexing representations of time and space. Syntax, diction, and metaphor almost heavy-handedly imply that time or space are somehow out of joint, anomalous, disjunct; yet narrative remains essentially linear or objectively framed, sometimes insistently so. When on verge of depicting subjective time, la Virginia Woolf, Bowen jostles back to an objective voice; likewise, just as she approaches 'spatial language [of] modernist 'style,'--Frederic Jameson's phrase for how English modernists render the unrepresentable [social] totality in figures of vague, vast, ever-expanding space (58-59)--something solid strain[s] against inrush of vaster distance (Bowen, Last September 92). Like so much in her fiction, Bowen s treatment of time and space is difficult to interpret, exemplifying what Susan Osborn so accurately describes as shot-through queerness of author's work--the way its stylistic quirks, destabilizing ... contradictions and ambiguities and odd syntaxes evoke ideas that we can fully attribute neither to characters' experiences nor to manifest political conflict in which they take place (189). As much as I agree and sympathize with Osborn, I think we do stand chance of comprehending this feature of Bowen s work, especially when we contrast it with representations of time and space that are more typical of early twentieth-century British modernism and that reflect its inclination to negate or suspend geographic parameters and accumulated of imperial nation-state. Studying this contrast in following pages, I will argue that crucial difference--Bowen s refusal to propose subjective time and abstract space as opposites of and successors to prior modality defined by historical and geographic orientation or rootedness--encourages us to consider Bowen s work in new theoretical context: shifting discourse of cosmopolitanism in critical approaches to global democracy. The cosmos and early British modernism Older ideas about cosmopolitanism, including many that remained central to intellectual climates of early twentieth-century London, are derived from rational view of statehood and function of achieved or settled that developed in Enlightenment. In 1795 Immanuel Kant disdained the opposition of states but deduced that such belligerent opposition was rational, or integral to natural design, insofar as it was logical precondition for a law of equilibrium [between] secure ... state [s] (257)--a precursor for distant international government for which there is no precedent in world history that would promote universal cosmopolitan condition, which Nature has as her ultimate purpose (260). The best evidence for this, Kant proposes, is subjective: individual's sense that something about present system is at odds with his or her noblest aspirations, sense he describes as rising feeling which each [individual in state] has for preservation of [global] whole (260). …