Re-Forming World Literature: Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Short Story

Description

The groundbreaking essays gathered in this volume argue that global paradigms of world literature, often referencing the major metropolitan centers of cultural and literary production, do not always accommodate voices from the margins and writing within minority genres such as the short story. Katherine Mansfield is a supreme example of a writer who is positioned between a number of different borders and boundaries: between modernism and postcolonialism; between the short story and other genres (like the novella or poetry, or nonfiction, such as letters, diaries, reviews, and translations); between Europe and New Zealand. In pointing to the global production and dissemination of short stories, and in particular the growing reception of Mansfield’s work worldwide since her death in 1923, the volume shows how literary modernism can be read in a myriad of ways in terms of the contemporary category of new world literature. CONTENTS Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction Global Modernisms Mansfield, Soma, and the Burning Dress of Modernism Of Parvenus and Pantheons: Mansfield’s Short Fiction as a “Reading Back” The Art of Work: Katherine Mansfield’s Servant and Perception UK and US Modernisms “Slippery British”: Katherine Mansfield’s Legacy in the UK “Kew Gardens” and “Miss Brill”: Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield as Short Story Writers Katherine Mansfield’s American Legacy: The Case of Margery Latimer Poetry, Suffering and the Self On First Looking into Mansfield’s Heine: Dislocative Lyric and the Sound of Music Constructing Jealousy, Exacting Revenge: Katherine Mansfield’s “Poison” and Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess” Katherine Mansfield: Homeostasis, Equanimity, and Fiction Fairy Stories and War Katherine Mansfield, Fairy Tales and Fir Trees: “the story is past too: past! past!—that’s the way with all stories” Consuming Identifications: Food Politics in Mansfield’s “A Suburban Fairy Tale” Treasure and Rot: Preservation and Bequest in Mansfield’s Short Fiction Death by Ink: The Symbolism of Ink in Katherine Mansfield’s “The Fly” Notes on Contributors Index