ABSTRACT
The concluding chapter summarizes the anti-anthropocentric approach to reading evocations of the material world in conjunction with sociocultural meanings and feminist critique and reconfiguration of social norms that is developed in this book. It charts the import of the analyses of Djuna Barnes’s, Katherine Mansfield’s, and Jean Rhys’s short stories for the study of modernist fiction. Furthermore, the short chapter suggests how their scope can be broadened to approaching materiality in literature beyond modernism, as a method of reading that is attentive to narrative and social structures while taking a crucial step beyond anthropocentrism. The conclusion argues that this shift in thinking can change how we read not just modernist short fiction but any narrative work.
