Introduction

This chapter introduces the material studied in the book, namely Djuna Barnes’s, Katherine Mansfield’s, and Jean Rhys’s short fiction, and the approach to reading material things as affective, agential, and meaningful, which the book proposes. The first subchapter introduces the way of reading materiality in the texts, drawing from a new materialist sensitivity to the nonhuman world, a phenomenologically and cognitively oriented analysis of the narrative means the texts use to connect materialities and ideas to construct experiential knowledge in embodied readers. I show how the two are in fruitful dialogue and also support the feminist aims of the book: to explore how the writers use the lived, material world to challenge social, especially gendered norms. The second subchapter points out the particular ways modernist short fiction opens up for a study of materialities and how the three writers in particular used the material world to invite affective and critical engagement. ¹