A revisionist study of Mansfield as a profoundly colonial yet daringly experimental writer, at the forefront of modernism. The essays in this volume draw on the complete journals, letters and stories, to reveal Mansfield as a modernist who transcended her artistic influences through a supreme understanding of voice, being and subjectivity.
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.
“Tender and unflinching, a beautifully observed novel about familial love and stoicism in the face of heartbreak.”—Carys Bray, award-winning author of The Museum of You Maeve Maloney is a force to be reckoned with. Despite nearing 80, she keeps Sea View Lodge just as her parents did during Morecambe’s 1950s heyday. But now only her employees and regular guests recognize the tenderness and heartbreak hidden beneath her spikiness. Until, that is, Vincent shows up. Vincent is the last person Maeve wants to see. He is the only man alive to have known her twin sister, Edie. The nightingale to Maeve’s crow, the dawn to Maeve’s dusk, Edie would have set her sights on the stage—all things being equal. But, from birth, things never were. If only Maeve could confront the secret past she shares with Vincent, she might finally see what it means to love and be loved—a lesson that her exuberant yet inexplicable twin may have been trying to teach her all along. Stylist Magazine Top “Books to Read on a Staycation” “Funny, heartbreaking and truly remarkable.”—Susan Barker, New York Times bestselling author “I found the novel most poignant and tender in its depiction of disability, without a whiff of sentimentality . . . it crept under my skill and will stay there for a long time.”—Emma Henderson, Orange Prize-shortlisted author of Grace Williams Says It Loud “Amazing: fierce, intelligent, compassionate and deeply moving . . . an important and very beautiful book.”—Edward Hogan, Desmond Elliot Prize-winning author of Blackmoor “Fresh, poignant and unlike anything else.”—Jill Dawson, Whitbread and Orange Prize-shortlisted author of The Crime Writer
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.
Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was one of the leading figures in the development of the modernist short story and her writings were a profound influence on writers such as Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence. Presenting for the first time draft manuscripts of some of her most important stories, this book gives scholars and students alike vivid new insight into Mansfield's creative process. With manuscripts for each text presented in facsimile and transcript, detailed notes throughout compare early drafts with later revisions and the final published work. In the final section of the book leading scholars offer vivid new critical readings exploring the manuscript history of these stories. A detailed descriptive listing of the major Mansfield archives is also included to help researchers explore the work further. The stories included are: 'Je ne parle pas francais'; 'Sun and Moon'; 'Revelations'; 'The Stranger'; 'The Daughters of the Late Colonel'; 'Mr and Mrs Dove'; 'Marriage à la Mode'; 'The Voyage'; 'Six Years After'; 'The Fly'.
Miss Meadows, a singing teacher, bustles into school one day in bad temper. Upon encountering her colleagues and young students, she is cold, bitter, and reproachful. But what could have brought out this sudden irritation and resentment in Miss Meadows? HarperPerennial Classics brings great works of literature to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperPerennial Classics collection to build your digital library.
Explores Katherine Mansfield's engagement in the periodical culture of the early twentieth century This book considers Mansfield's ambivalent position as a colonial woman writer by examining her contributions to the political weekly The New Age, the avant-garde little magazine Rhythm and the literary journal The Athenaeum. Contextualising Mansfield's work against the editorial strategies and professional cultures of each periodical, the book deepens and complicates older critical assumptions about the trajectory of Mansfield's development as a writer. Key FeaturesProvides the first sustained scholarly examination of Mansfield's engagement with and relation to early twentieth-century periodical cultureForegrounds the original material contexts in which Mansfield produced the majority of her work, emphasising a dialogic or 'conversational' model for modernismInterrogates Mansfield's ambivalent self-positioning within English literary circles as a 'colonial-metropolitan modernist' and 'outsider'Integrates ideas of the recent 'transnational turn' across literary studies into the field of periodical scholarship
Fantastic and Gothic readings of Mansfield's short stories present us with a covert, darker world, alongside seemingly familiar actions and eventsThis volume investigates an unexpectedly rich vein of literary gothic motifs and tropes found within Mansfield's modernist, experimental prose. The essays investigate her development of the fairytale in several stories discloses how the 'Cinderella' story underpins 'Her First Ball', how 'Little Red Riding Hood' lurks beneath 'The Little Governess', and how the figure of the changeling inhabits 'A Suburban Fairy Tale'. Mansfield's explorations of the conscious and unconscious mind are elucidated through a discussion of Freud's theory of the uncanny and the unsettling effects of language in Mansfield's In A German Pension stories. Finally, the term 'charm' is revealed as spanning the two extremes of the fantastic and the ordinary which combine in Mansfield's evocations of the enchantment of domestic interiors.
This volume addresses issues raised by Katherine Mansfield's nomadic rootlessness as an 'extraterritorial' writer. Contributions draw on postcolonial and diasporic frameworks to examine Mansfield's insights into colony and empire.