This volume offers an introductory overview to the short stories of Katherine Mansfield, discussing a wide range of her most famous stories from different viewpoints. The book elaborates on Mansfield's themes and techniques, thereby guiding the reader - via close textual analysis - to an understanding of the author's modernist techniques.
Reveals how Katherine Mansfield's understanding of art and music shaped and inspired her writingThis volume emphasises the centrality of Katherine Mansfield to the cultural life of her time, illuminating how her love of painting and of music inspired her art. The Fauvist paintings of the Scottish colourist F.D. Fergusson, the music of Debussy, and indeed, of Wagner, all helped to forge a precise aesthetic, founded above all on the intense study and - in the case of music - practice of artistic technique. The essays in this volume explore Mansfield's relationships with the visual arts and with music, bringing to light the way in which these helped to shape the formal qualities of her writing: its beauty of line and intensely musical effects. Mansfield's relationship with Woolf is also strongly in the frame. As befits a volume dedicated to the arts, there is an introduction, poetry and a new short story by highly-acclaimed writers who count Mansfield amongst their chief inspirations.
This new general introduction emphasises the importance of the short story to an understanding of modern fiction.In twenty succinct chapters, the study paints a complete portrait of the short story - its history, culture, aesthetics and economics. European innovators such as Chekhov, Flaubert and Kafka are compared to Irish, New Zealand and British practitioners such as Joyce, Mansfield and Carter as well as writers in the American tradition, from Hawthorne and Poe to Barthelme and Carver.Fresh attention is paid to experimental, postcolonial and popular fiction alongside developments in Anglo-American, Hispanic and European literature. Critical approaches to the short story are debated and reassessed, while discussion of the short story is related to contemporary critical theory. In what promises to be essential reading for students and academics, the study sets out to prove that the short story remains vital to the emerging culture of the twenty-first century.
The narration delves on the living and values of a large family in New Zealand. With trivial details of characters such as personality, gestures and attitudes, Mansfield has managed to delve into the psychology of characters and produce individuals that instantly capture attention. A must-read....
Katherine 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.
Considered one of the greatest short story writers of her generation, Katherine Mansfield was a modernist writer from New Zealand. This collection includes thirty-five of her most popular stories. In this volume you will find the following stories: "The Tiredness of Rosabel," "At Lehmann's," "Frau Brechenmacher Attends a Wedding," "The Swing of the Pendulum," "The Woman at the Store," "How Pearl Button Was Kidnapped," "Ole Underwood," "Millie," "Bains Turcs'," "The Little Governess," "An Indiscreet Journey," "The Wind Blows," "Prelude," "A Dill Pickle," "Je Ne Parle Pas Francais," "Bliss," "Psychology," "Pictures," "The Man Without a Temperament," "Revelations," "The Escape," "The Young Girl," "The Stranger," "Miss Brill," "Poison," "The Daughters of the Late Colonel," "Life of Ma Parker," "Her First Ball," "Marriage y la Mode," "At the Bay," "The Voyage," "The Garden Party," "The Doll's House," "The Fly," and "The Canary."
In 2009, Kirsty Gunn returned to spend the winter in her hometown of Wellington, New Zealand, also the place where Katherine Mansfield grew up. In this exquisitely written “notebook,” which blends memoir, biography, and essay, Gunn records that winter-long experience and the unparalleled insight it allowed her into Mansfield’s fiction. Gunn explores the idea of home and belonging—and of the profound influence of Mansfield’s work on her own creative journey. She asks whether it is even possible to “come home”—and who are we when we get there?
