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.

A reinterpretation of Katharine Mansfield's work that expands our understanding of her place in Modernism.

This book reappraises the philosophical value of short fiction by Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen, examining the stories through the lens of specific everyday objects. Looking at Woolf and armchairs, Mansfield and snack food, and Bowen and fashion accessories, it probes the aesthetic resonance between these stories’ form and contents and also considers the modes of thinking they might promote. Conceiving of their short fiction as intrinsically radical and experimental even within a wider context of modernist innovation, this book shows how these important women writers brought quotidian objects to riotous life, in such a way that tasked readers with reevaluating their everyday existence. Overall, Modernist Short Fiction and Things argues that short fiction epitomises modernist aesthetics, functioning as a resonant source for investigation and complementing and expanding our understanding of modernist epistemology.

This book maps the ecologies of Mansfield's influences beyond her modernist and postcolonial contexts, observing that it roams wildly over six centuries, across three continents and beyond cultural and linguistic boundaries.

Through her formally innovative and psychologically insightful short stories, Katherine Mansfield is increasingly recognised as one of the central figures in early 20th-century modernism. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars and covering her complete body of work, this is the most comprehensive volume to Mansfield scholarship available today. The Bloomsbury Handbook to Katherine Mansfield covers the full range of contemporary scholarly themes and approaches to the author's work, including: · New biographical insights, including into the early New Zealand years · Responses to the historical crises: the Great War, empire and orientalism · Mansfield's fiction, poetry, criticism and private writing · Mansfield and modernist culture – from Bloomsbury to the little magazines · Mansfield and her contemporaries – Woolf, Lawrence and von Arnim · Mansfield and the arts – visual culture, cinema and music The book also includes a substantial annotated bibliography of key works of Mansfield scholarship from the last 30 years.

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.

The New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield associated intimately with many members of the Bloomsbury group, but her literary aesthetics placed her at a distance from the artistic works of the group. With chapters written by leading international scholars, Katherine Mansfield and the Bloomsbury Group explores this conflicted relationship. Bringing together biographical and critical studies, the book examines Mansfield's relationships – personal and literary – with such major Modernist figures as Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley and Walter de la Mare as well as the ways in which her work engaged with and reacted against Bloomsbury. In this way the book reveals the true extent of Mansfield's wider influence on 20th-century modernist writing.

Examines Katherine Mansfield's engagement with the First World War and its impact on her writingsThis special issue of Katherine Mansfield Studies is in remembrance of the centenary of one of the most significant events of the modernist period. Like the reclamation of women's war writings that we have already seen in relation to Virginia Woolf and others, Mansfield's literary response to the key political event of her time is fundamental to our understanding of her developing writerly style. It is in her responses to the war that we find a 'political Mansfield', and the articles in this volume provide us with a greater appreciation of Mansfield in her socio-historical context. In offering new readings of Mansfield's explicit and implicit war stories, the contributions to this volume refine and extend our knowledge of particular stories and their genealogy. They illuminate the specific and more general influences of the war on Mansfield's evolving technique and, jointly, they reveal the importance of the war on her literary language, as well as for her own particular brand of modernism. This volume helps develop our ideas of what constitute war writings and, in so doing, expands the scope of Mansfield scholarship and the field of First World War studies.

The notion that violence can give rise to art - and that art can serve as an agent of violence - is a dominant feature of modernist literature. In this study Paul Sheehan traces the modernist fascination with violence to the middle decades of the nineteenth century, when certain French and English writers sought to celebrate dissident sexualities and stylized criminality. Sheehan presents a panoramic view of how the aesthetics of transgression gradually mutates into an infatuation with destruction and upheaval, identifying the First World War as the event through which the modernist aesthetic of violence crystallizes. By engaging with exemplary modernists such as Joyce, Conrad, Eliot and Pound, as well as lesser-known writers including Gautier, Sacher-Masoch, Wyndham Lewis and others, Sheehan shows how artworks, so often associated with creative well-being and communicative self-expression, can be reoriented toward violent and bellicose ends.

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.