Celebrating Katherine Mansfield : A Centenary Volume of Essays

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. Front Matter....Pages i-xiv Introduction....Pages 1-10 Front Matter....Pages 11-11 Signing Off: Katherine Mansfield’s Last Year....Pages 13-27 Katie and Chummie: Death in the Family....Pages 28-41 ‘A Furious Bliss’: Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry 1916–1918....Pages 42-54 Front Matter....Pages 55-55 Mansfield as Colonial Modernist: Difference Within....Pages 57-71 Leaping into the Eyes: Mansfield as a Cinematic Writer....Pages 72-83 Katherine Mansfield and Music: Nineteenth-Century Echoes....Pages 84-98 ‘Is this Play?’: Katherine Mansfield’s Play Frames....Pages 99-112 Front Matter....Pages 113-113 Katherine Mansfield’s Uncanniness....Pages 115-130 A Trickle of Voice: Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Moment of Being....Pages 131-143 ‘Ah, What is it? — that I Heard’: The Sense of Wonder in Katherine Mansfield’s Stories and Poems....Pages 144-157 Cold Brains and Birthday Cake: The Art of ‘Je ne parle pas français’....Pages 158-171 Front Matter....Pages 173-173 ‘Where is Katherine?’: Longing and (Un)belonging in the Works of Katherine Mansfield....Pages 175-188 Mansfield and Dickens: ‘I am not Reading Dickens Idly’....Pages 189-201 ‘Not Always Swift and Breathless’: Katherine Mansfield and the Familiar Letter....Pages 202-213 Meetings with ‘the Great Ghost’....Pages 214-228 Back Matter....Pages 229-241 This volume offers new interpretations of Katherine Mansfield's work by bringing together recent auto/biographical and critical-theoretical approaches to her life and art. It aims to revive and update Mansfield's reputation as one of the foremost practitioners of the short story, bringing together and extending the flow of scholarship and criticism of her work over the last three decades. It includes essays by major scholars in several areas including musicology, postcolonial theory, epistolary and biographical studies, representing recent developments in Modernist studies and thus exploring her continued literary legacy to contemporary writers. It features reinterpretations of her fiction in relation to her life, historical and aesthetic studies of her literary Modernism, readings and interpretations of her work which focus on constructions of voice and self, new insights into her handling of genres such as fantasy, and the appearance of the uncanny in many stories. It will be of interest to students, general readers and scholars of Mansfield alike