ABSTRACT

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.

part I|76 pages

The Polish Katherine Mansfield

chapter 1|15 pages

‘From the other side of the world’

Katherine Mansfield, Poland and Poetry

chapter 2|23 pages

God the Father

Stanisław Wyspiański and Katherine Mansfield

chapter 3|19 pages

The Deed, the Dead and the Living Blood

Katherine Mansfield's ‘To Stanislaw Wyspianski' and Its Translation into Polish by Floryan Sobieniowski

chapter 4|17 pages

Between Absence and Presence

On Katherine Mansfield's Early Reception in Poland

part II|74 pages

Katherine Mansfield's Connectivity

chapter 5|16 pages

Absence, Distance and Influence

Dorothy Wordsworth's Journals, Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry

chapter 6|14 pages

Compassion and Moral Responsibility

Emma and ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel'

chapter 7|16 pages

The Perils of Autobiography

Katherine Mansfield and the Case of George Gissing

chapter 8|12 pages

Gendered Violence and Narrative Complicity in Katherine Mansfield and Leonard Woolf

‘The Woman at the Store' and ‘A Tale Told by Moonlight'

chapter 9|14 pages

Katherine Mansfield's American Legacy

The Case of Dorothy Parker

part III|54 pages

Arts, Spaces and the Writing Process

chapter 10|12 pages

Making Music, Making Room

Musical Performances and the Construction of Space in the Works of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf

chapter 11|12 pages

Waves and ‘moment[s] of suspension’

Katherine Mansfield's Painterly and Kinetic Language in Fiction

chapter 13|11 pages

On Being Chased by a Bull

Imagination, Writing and the Rush of the Short Story