Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism

Description

Katharine Mansfield's arrival in London in 1908 marked the start of her professional career as a writer and this study marks a revival of her reputation as one of the foremost practitioners of the short story. The international line-up of contributors attests to Mansfield's global appeal. By discussing her fiction in relation to her life, the contributors to this critical work present reinterpretations and readings. Enhanced by new transcriptions of manuscripts and access to her diaries and letters, these readings combine biographical approaches with critical-theoretical ones and focus not only on philosophy and fiction, but class and gender, biography/autobiography. The historical and aesthetic studies of Mansfield's work all take place within a framework of modernist literature, criticism and theory, thereby expanding our understanding of what it means to be a Modernist while allocating Mansfield a firm place in any current study of Modernism.

Janet Wilson is Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Northampton, UK, Research Fellow in New Zealand Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, and Co-Editor of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing. Gerri Kimber is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Northampton. She is Series Editor of the four-volume Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield.

'[This book] reads Mansfield's work through diverse theoretical lenses and in tandem with a range of contemporaneous movements; [it] features essays that make good use of the life writings recently made available to critics.' -Woolf Studies Annual '[This book] reads Mansfield's work through diverse theoretical lenses and in tandem with a range of contemporaneous movements; [it] features essays that make good use of the life writings recently made available to critics.' -Woolf Studies Annual 'Few publications have declared, with such vigour or such clarity, that rather remarkable rise in Katherine Mansfield's reputation over the last two decades, her moving from her slot as minor writer to a central role in Modernism, as does this fresh collection of essays by younger scholars. 'The most emblematic woman writer of her time,' the New York Times Book Review has called her. These essays take up the challenge to ask why and how this is so, as they read her with flair and depth against the literary and philosophical currents where she now takes her place. We can no longer consider twentieth-century writing without Mansfield among its key figures, her fiction and letters among its enduring texts.' -- Vincent O' Sullivan, co-editor of The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield This is a valuable contribution to the fast growing canon of Mansfield studies, approaching her work with sensitive analysis, and a strong, historical background. -- Katherine Mansfield Studies The volume, then, is a series of cohesive and scholarly essays, bringing a refreshing new international range of voices to the sphere of Mansfield criticism and including a comprehensive index. A very welcome addition to this rapidly developing field. -- Cambridge Quarterly, vol 40, no 4 This collection of wide-ranging and stimulating essays attests to the renewed and burgeoning interest in the work of Katherine Mansfield... the sophisticated and innovative analyses offered in this collection stand as a fitting tribute to a writer who herself was intent on exploring 'what lies beneath the rich strange surfaces'. This collection not only sheds a new light on a writer frequently sidelined in critical work in modernist studies, but importantly opens a clear pathway for further re-evaluation of Mansfield's role in the production of British modernism and our understandings of its many complexities. -- Review of English Studies