Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction

1993 ◽  
Vol 88 (1) ◽  
pp. 176
Author(s):  
Angela Smith ◽  
Sydney Janet Kaplan ◽  
Heather Murray
Keyword(s):  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Modernist Fiction

Who is My Contemporary? Woolf, Mansfield, and Their Servants

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Domestic Labor ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Domestic Servants ◽  
Modernist Fiction

This chapter argues that Virginia Woolf’s female contemporaries include not just fellow writers like Katherine Mansfield but also domestic servants, whose work enables writerly creation. The chapter focuses on representations of domestic servants in Mrs Dalloway and “The Garden Party” and in Woolf’s and Mansfield’s private writings. The chapter compares Woolf’s and Mansfield’s texts to demonstrate different ways of depicting and understanding servant labor and to show the centrality of servants to the form of modernist fiction. It suggests that servants are too often marginalized in analyses of modernist narrative innovation, and argues for a broader examination of the significance of domestic labor to better understand modernist fiction.

scholarly journals The status of the narrator in Modernist fiction

2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 75-97
Author(s):  
Violeta Sotirova
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Theoretical Explanation ◽  
The Self ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Linguistic Representation ◽  
Naturally Occurring ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Status ◽  
Generic Pronouns ◽  
Modernist Fiction

AbstractThis article explores hitherto unexplored complexities in the positioning of the Modernist narrator. Taking as a starting point Banfield’s ‘empty centre’ technique, the article re-evaluates the difficulties posed by this phenomenon and develops a more thorough and a sounder understanding of ‘the empty centre’. Some of the evidence for a new theory of ‘empty centre’ passages comes from pragmatics and naturally occurring discourse data. In particular, an investigation of the impersonal uses of generic pronouns, which Monika Fludernik (1993. The fictions of language and the languages of fiction: The linguistic representation of speech and consciousness. London: Routledge; 1996. Towards a natural narratology. London: Routledge) had established as key to our understanding of the technique, sheds new light on the nature of the ‘empty centre’ technique and leads to a new understanding of the status of the Modernist narrator. I propose that it is most plausible that the reader will naturalise examples of ‘the empty centre’ as stemming from the narrator. I also argue that we need to construct a new understanding of the status of the Modernist narrator which takes into account some of the central tenets of the Modernist aesthetic, those concerning subjectivity and the possibility of objectivity. Thus, what emerges from the analysis is that the self, and the narratorial figure by extension, can no longer be endowed with the power of omniscience. I will develop my theoretical explanation of ‘the empty centre’ and the positioning of the narrator in Modernist fiction with reference to a variety of examples, mainly drawn from Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf.

Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Anton Chekhov ◽  
Evelyn Waugh ◽  
Literary Influence ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
John Middleton Murry

Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence seeks to understand influence, a powerful yet mysterious and undertheorised impetus for artistic production, by exploring Katherine Mansfield’s wide net of literary associations. Mansfield’s case proves that influence is careless of chronologies, spatial limits, artistic movements and cultural differences. Expanding upon theories of influence that focus on anxiety and coteries, this book demonstrates that it is as often unconscious as it is conscious, and can register as satire, yearning, copying, homage and resentment. 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. Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence identifies Mansfield’s involvement in six modes of literary influence - Ambivalence, Exchange, Identification, Imitation, Enchantment and Legacy. In so doing, it revisits key issues in Mansfield studies, including her relationships with Virginia Woolf, John Middleton Murry and S. S. Koteliansky, as well as the famous plagiarism case regarding Anton Chekhov. It also charts new territories for exploration, expanding the terrain of Mansfield's influence to include writers as diverse as Colette, Evelyn Waugh, Nettie Palmer, Eve Langley and Frank Sargeson.

Katherine Mansfield and Translation

2015 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Literary Language ◽  
Specific Interest ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Political Ideas ◽  
Key Features ◽  
Critical Interest

Our understanding of Anglophone modernism has been transformed by recent critical interest in translation. The central place of translation in the circulation of aesthetic and political ideas in the early twentieth century has been underlined, for example, as well as translation’s place in the creative and poetic dynamics of key modernist texts. This volume of Katherine Mansfield Studies offers a timely assessment of Mansfield’s place in such exchanges. As a reviewer, she developed a specific interest in literatures in translation, as well as showing a keen awareness of the translator’s presence in the text. Throughout her life, Mansfield engaged with new literary texts through translation, either translating proficiently herself, or working alongside a co-translator to explore the semantic and stylistic challenges of partially known languages. The metaphorical resonances of translating, transition and marginality also remain key features of her writing throughout her life. Meanwhile, her enduring popularity abroad is ensured by translations of her works, all of which reveal sociological and even ideological agendas of their own, an inevitable reflection of individual translators’ readings of her works, and the literary traditions of the new country and language of reception. The contributions to this volume refine and extend our appreciation of her specifically trans-linguistic and trans-literary lives. They illuminate the specific and more general influences of translation on Mansfield’s evolving technique and, jointly, they reveal the importance of translation on her literary language, as well as for her own particular brand of modernism.

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