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.

scholarly journals ENTREVISTA: Deconstructing Katherine Mansfield: An Interview with Vincent O’Sullivan

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerardo Rodríguez Salas
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Fictional Characters ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Sexual Ambiguity ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
John Middleton Murry ◽  
E Mail

La presente entrevista1 con Vincent O’Sullivan, uno de los críticos más distinguidos en estudios sobre Katherine Mansfield y escritor reconocido, tuvo lugar en Wellington, Nueva Zealand, durante el verano de 2002, con posteriores modificaciones por e-mail. El editor de The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield discute aspectos centrales en la narrativa de esta autora, tales como su alcance literario, su relación con el relato corto, su ambigüedad sexual, el distanciamiento entre ella como autora y los personajes que crea, su peculiar modernismo distinto del canónico masculino, el papel de los niños y la autobiografía en su narrativa y sus principales logros y defectos como escritora. El resultado es una imagen subversiva de Mansfield que contrasta con el mito purificador cuidadosamente elaborado por su esposo John Middleton Murry tras la muerte de Mansfield en 1923.Abstract: Held in Wellington, New Zealand, during the summer of 2002 and subsequently upgraded via email, this is an interview with one of the most reputable scholars in Katherine Mansfield studies, Prof. Vincent O’Sullivan, a prolific and respectable writer himself. The editor of Mansfield’s Collected Letters discusses key issues in Mansfield’s fiction, such as her literary status, her connection with the short story genre, her sexual ambiguity, the breach between herself and the fictional characters that she creates, her distinctive modernism as detached from the male canon, the role of children and autobiography in her narrative, and her main achievements and flaws as a writer. The result is a subversive image of Mansfield, opposed to the purifying myth craftily designed by her husband John Middleton Murry after her death in 1923.

Seated between ‘Geniuses’: Conrad Aiken’s Imaginative and Critical Responses to Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf

2018 ◽  
pp. 42-54
Author(s):  
Sydney Janet Kaplan
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Short Stories ◽  
Creative Writing ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
The United States ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
American Poet ◽  
John Middleton Murry

The writing of the American poet, fiction writer and critic, Conrad Aiken (1889-1973) significantly affected the critical receptions of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. His personal encounters with them during his time of involvement in the production of the Athenaeum is reflected not only in his incisive reviews of their fiction, but in his own creative writing as well. His short stories and experimental memoir, Ushant, (1963) reveal the two women's differing forms of influence upon him. In his memoir, he portrays the relations between Woolf and Mansfield as representative of the ‘merciless warfare’ that prevailed in the London literary world in 1920. If his creative legacy from Woolf was stylistic and psychological, from Mansfield it was inspirational. He was in love with the spontaneity and life-enhancing vitality of her prose, her ‘genius’ for making her characters ‘real.’ The sense of an intuitive connection between himself and Mansfield underpins his imaginative efforts to recreate his encounters with her, as is exemplified most powerfully in his short story: ‘Your Obituary, Well Written,’ (1928) in which he creates a thinly veiled portrait of characters uncannily similar to Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry.

‘The Silence is Broken’: Katherine Mansfield and the ‘Manifesto Moment’

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Reid
Keyword(s):  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Literary Influence ◽  
John Middleton Murry

This chapter explores Katherine Mansfield’s desire to influence other writers through exchange as ‘a quieter rehearsal of ideas amongst friends and artists’, an alternative to the ‘high manifesto’ favoured by her male contemporaries and collaborators D. H. Lawrence and John Middleton Murry. Mansfield's letters, a form premised on exchange, reveal her conscious desire and determination to impress her ideas about art and life on her contemporaries. This chapter prioritises literary influence through the text itself, illustrating how, through her stories, reviews and letters, Mansfield was able to exert influence even at a distance from her friends and colleagues, exploiting her position as a successful, published writer to didactically advise others.

‘[A]ctively Making One Feel’: Katherine Mansfield, Evolving Empathy and Intimate Influence in Virginia Woolf’s Writings of the 1920s and 1930s

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katie Macnamara
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Russian Literature ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter offers a reassessment of the relationship between Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf by exploring how Mansfield’s imitation of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s ‘underworld’ influenced Woolf’s perspective on Russian literature and on her friend and rival. The chapter charts Woolf’s growing empathy for Mansfield in the years after her death, arguing that this empathy constitutes a form of influence itself, as imitations of Mansfield’s experience are located in Woolf’s diary, criticism, growing feminist sensibility and fiction.

‘Where is she?’ Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jessica Gildersleeve
Keyword(s):  
The Other ◽  
Elizabeth Bowen ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Literary Influence ◽  
The One ◽  
Absent Presence

This chapter examines the absent presence of Katherine Mansfield in Elizabeth Bowen’s personal and fictional writing to demonstrate how loss, desire and mourning might constitute a particularly female mode of literary influence. It explores Bowen’s ambivalent perceptions of Mansfield as a literary influence throughout her career, on the one hand protesting against her influence and defending her own originality, and on the other recognising her innovation and mourning her as a ‘lost contemporary’. Gildersleeve argues that the literary relationship between Bowen and Mansfield eludes both the Bloomian model of destroying the predecessor and the model of matrilineal heritage preferred by feminist literary critics. Instead, influence between Mansfield and Bowen registers as a ‘desire for kinship, and resentment that this bond does not exist’.

Love and the Art Object

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joanne Winning
Keyword(s):  
Object Relations ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Emotional Intimacy ◽  
Artistic Production ◽  
Art Object ◽  
Art Objects ◽  
Sexual Desires

Chapter 6 examines how lesbian modernists oppose ideas of artistic impersonality through imbricating intimate affects in the production of their art objects. Objects considered here include literary texts, paintings, houses and interiors. The chapter engages both Michael Hardt’s notion of “corporeal reason” and the object relations psychoanalysis of D.W. Winnicott and Marion Milner to argue that Virginia Woolf, Gluck, and Eileen Gray demonstrate an intense concern with the materiality of artistic production. This preoccupation with “stuff” conveys a visceral, affective appreciation of their art, which serves as a realm in which transgressive sexual desires and identities may be safely articulated. From Gray’s lacquered surfaces to Gluck’s plasticine frames, these modernist art objects are saturated with affect, serving as tangible, material expressions of bodily and emotional intimacy.

The Tree of Knowledge: New Insights on Katherine Mansfield, Oscar Wilde and ‘A Woman’

2017 ◽  
pp. 175-189
Author(s):  
Giles Whiteley
Keyword(s):  
Oscar Wilde ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Unknown Source ◽  
Tree Of Knowledge ◽  
Critical Heritage ◽  
John Middleton Murry

This article examines in detail a number of unattributed quotations taken from the journals of 1907, signed ‘O.W.’, ‘A Woman’ and ‘A.W.’. I call into question the critical heritage on these signatures, which has taken them to refer to Oscar Wilde and to Mansfield herself, an error traced to the early work of John Middleton Murry. This article instead establishes Mansfield’s hitherto unknown source as the novel The Tree of Knowledge, by an anonymous author, and offers a close reading of the Mansfield’s use of the novel in these pages. The article concludes by speculating as to the author, and as to how Mansfield came to read the text.

The Zeppelin in the Sky of the Mind

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christine Froula
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Spanish Civil War ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Total War ◽  
Aerial Warfare ◽  
Global War ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Modern Warfare ◽  
The Military ◽  
Bernard Shaw

While First World War historians often emphasize civilians’ experience of ‘war at a distance’, the military dirigible floated over the divide between civilian and soldier, brought aerial warfare to Britain’s island fortress, and inaugurated a mode of modern warfare that defies spatial and temporal containment. This essay foregrounds the zeppelin’s psychic impact on the civilian imaginary from 1914 through the Spanish Civil War to the Blitz, tracing its conceptual and aesthetic representation in diaries, letters, novels, essays, and plays by Virginia Woolf, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Katherine Mansfield, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, Muriel Rukeyser, Julian Bell and others. These writings document an unending European-civil-imperial-global war in which aerial technologies at once enlarge human powers almost beyond imagining and dwarf them to the point of negation. Inspiring both wonder and the new terror of total war, the zeppelin created a permanent change in civilians’ psychic weather and remains an inescapable presence in the sky of the mind.

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