Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace : At the Mercy of the Public

Katherine Mansfield had a career-long engagement with the literary marketplace from the age of eighteen. This book examines how she developed as a writer within a range of book and periodical publishing contexts, reconsidering her writing's enactment of a commercially viable modern aesthetic in her experimentation with the short story form. Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Marketplace provides the first comprehensive study of Mansfield's career as a professional writer in a commercial literary world, during the years that saw the emergence and consolidation of literary modernism in Britain. It draws on recent critical trends in the field of material modernist studies to posit a new reading of her stories and their lovation within a modernist marketplace. Mansfield's association with periodicals such as the New Age, Rhythm and the Athenaeum, and with the Hogarth Press, are illustrative of her use of key modes that aided the development and dissemination of modernist texts between the years 1910 and 1922. At the same time, she took increasing advantage of popular publishing in illustrated newspapers and magazines. The book argues that these publishing contexts shaped Mansfield's development as a writer, and presents a new interpretation of her stories' enactment of a commercially viable modernist aesthetic Front Matter....Pages i-ix Introduction: ‘Principles as Light as my Purse’....Pages 1-14 ‘Too Sharply Modelled’: Mansfield and the New Age 1910–11....Pages 15-45 ‘An Editorial Dogfight’: Murry, Rhythm and the Blue Review 1912–13....Pages 46-76 ‘A Sort of Authority’: From Signature to the Hogarth Press 1915–18....Pages 77-106 ‘A Writer First’: ‘Je ne parle pas français’, the Athenaeum and Bliss 1919–20....Pages 107-138 ‘At the Mercy of the Public’: The London Mercury, the Sphere and The Garden Party 1921–2....Pages 139-167 Afterword: ‘Boiling Katherine’s Bones’....Pages 168-173 Back Matter....Pages 174-220 Introduction : "principles as light as my purse" "Too sharply modelled" : Mansfield and the New Age 1910-11 "A sort of authority" : from Signature to the Hogarth Press 1915-18 "A writer first" : "je ne parle pas français", the Athenaeum and Bliss 1919-20 "At the mercy of the public" : the London Mercury, the Sphere and The Garden Party 1921-2 Afterword : major periodical publications (1920-22).