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.

Includes a literary reflection on Mansfield's work by award-winning novelist Ali Smith. Katherine Mansfield: New Directions brings together leading international scholars to explore and celebrate the modernist short fiction writer, Katherine Mansfield. Reassessing Mansfield's life, work and reputation in the light of new research in literary modernism the book maps new directions for future Mansfield studies in the twenty-first century. Drawing on current work from postcolonial studies, eco-criticism, affect studies, book, periodical and manuscript studies, and auto/biographical and critical-theoretical approaches to her life and art as well as new archival discoveries, this is an essential contribution to our deepening understanding of a central modernist figure.

New analysis of Katherine Mansfield's contribution to modernism, above all her underexplored relationship with D.H. LawrenceKatherine Mansfield and Modernism is given a distinct focus in this volume by an emphasis on her under-explored relationship with D. H. Lawrence, to whom, both as artist and person, she felt herself uncannily alike. In addition to investigating Mansfield's literary and biographical relationship with Lawrence, the essays for this volume examine widely varied aspects of Mansfield's modernism including her modernist revision of fairy-tale motifs, and the aesthetic, psychological and political contexts for her work. Further essays place her within a broader international and cultural framework, analysing her important relationship with modernist 'little magazines' and demonstrating how Mansfield and other artists from beyond Europe formed and developed literary modernism. The volume contains a preface and new short stories and poems by internationally-esteemed writers. The relationship between Mansfield and Lawrence is also given dramatic form in an original play-script first published in this volume and based on the period during 1916 when Mansfield and Murry shared a pair of remote cottages with Frieda and D. H. Lawrence at Zennor in Cornwall.

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.

In opposition to traditional interpretations of the period, Kaplan (English, U. of Washington) asserts that women writers were at the center rather than on the margins of British modernism. She examines Mansfield's contribution to modernist fiction; her struggles as a writer during the era of modernist experimentation; and such issues as the problematics of genre, the encoding of sexuality, and the critical debate over impersonality. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Taking on the neglected issue of the short story's relationship to literary Modernism, Claire Drewery examines works by Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair, and Virginia Woolf. Drewery argues that the short story as a genre is preoccupied with transgressing boundaries, and thus offers an ideal platform from which to examine the Modernist fascination with the liminal. Embodying both liberation and restriction, liminal spaces on the one hand enable challenges to traditional cultural and personal identities, while on the other hand they entail the inevitable negative consequences of occupying the position of the outsider: marginality, psychosis, and death. Mansfield, Richardson, Sinclair, and Woolf all exploit this paradox in their short fiction, which typically explores literal and psychological borderline states that are resistant to rational analysis. Thus, their short stories offered these authors an opportunity to represent the borders of unconsciousness and to articulate meaning while also conveying a sense of that which is unsayable. Through their concern with liminality, Drewery shows, these writers contribute significantly to the Modernist aesthetic that interrogates identity, the construction of the self, and the relationship between the individual and society.

Katherine Mansfield has been widely recognised as one of the key authors of her generation, continuing to influence literary modernism and the short story genre through her nomadic existence, colonial perspective, eclectic interests and impressive range of literary acquaintances. This volume utilises these seemingly endless avenues for critical exploration, analysing Mansfield’s influences, including the familial, historical and geographical as well as literary and artistic approaches. Some connections are well established and acknowledged, some controversial, many still undiscovered. This volume brings a fresh collection of original viewpoints on Katherine Mansfield’s life and work, both of which, in her own case, are frequently indistinguishable. It investigates her fascinating connection with Poland which is explored in a complex and detailed way for the first time; suggests new or revised views on her connections to other English and American writers; and finally examines some of the aspects of her writing process, her engagement with the arts, imagination, memories and her constructions of different kinds of space.

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.