Re-forming World Literature: Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Short Story (Studies in World Literature) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 3838211138 ISBN 13: 9783838211138

Publisher: ibidem Press, 2018

Synopsis

The ground-breaking essays gathered in this volume argue that global paradigms of World Literature, often referencing the major metropolitan centres of cultural and literary production, do not always accommodate voices from the margins and writing within minority genres such as the short story. Katherine Mansfield is a supreme example of a writer who is positioned between a number of different borders and boundaries: between modernism and postcolonialism; between the short story and other genres (like the novella or poetry, or non-fiction, such as letters, diaries, reviews, and translations); between Europe and New Zealand. In pointing to the global production and dissemination of short stories, and in particular the growing reception of Mansfield’s work worldwide since her death in 1923, the volume shows how literary modernism can be read in a myriad of ways in terms of the contemporary category of new World Literature.

About this title

About the Author:

Gerri Kimber is visiting professor in the Department of English, University of Northampton. She is chair of the Katherine Mansfield Society and the author of Katherine Mansfield: The Early Years (2016), Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story (2015), and Katherine Mansfield: The View from France (2008). She is series editor of the four-volume Edinburgh edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield (2012–16).

Janet Wilson is professor of English and postcolonial studies at the University of Northampton. She has published widely on Australian and New Zealand writing and cinema, as well as on the diaspora writing of white settler societies. She is coeditor of the book series Studies in World Literature at ibidem Press and coeditor of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Review:

This important collection gathers an international group of scholars to position Mansfield’s work in global literary frameworks. Lively, engaging, and timely interpretations emerge here, reading Mansfield’s writing alongside that of a range of authors with whom her work has not been compared before. Highly original and drawing on a dazzling range of reference, these essays offer new understandings not only of Mansfield’s life and work, but of the short story’s history and place in world literature. (Rishona Zimring, Lewis and Clark College)

This new collection expertly demonstrates the distinctive features of Mansfield’s fiction, notably the registration of affect as manifested in an intense, fluctuating, yet always embodied vitality that plays across subjectivity, setting, and narrative alike and which marks off her modernism. In a widely contextualized series of focused analyses, the chapters unite in a reappraisal of the status of the short story to confirm Mansfield’s contribution to this mode, specifically in the tradition of women’s writing, and her growing presence as a transnational figure in the newly demarcated field of world literature. (Peter Brooker, Emeritus Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies, Department of Culture, Film and Media, University of Nottingham)

About this edition

• Publisher: ibidem Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 3838211138
• ISBN 13: 9783838211138
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 250
• Editor: Kimber Gerri, Wilson Janet