ABSTRACT
This chapter traces the ways Djuna Barnes and Katherine Mansfield use the modernist short story form blur the boundaries between the human and the nonhuman, drawing from new materialist and anti-anthropocentric conceptions of agency. It explores the ways Barnes’s stories create assemblages of affective bodies and embed them within their environments, showing how her descriptions of human and nonhuman bodies create alternative spaces where our habitual ways of seeing subjects and objects do not apply, and how this, too, may expand our tacit, cultural knowledge of gendered bodies. In a similar vein, the chapter approaches Katherine Mansfield’s stories and in particular their experimentation with the modernist topos of the party and their use of children as focalizers as expansions of the notion of “a life” beyond the normative boundaries of human life narratives. I suggest that these devices serve both nonanthropocentric and feminist ethical aims, thereby exemplifying how these aims in fact often intersect.
