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.

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 On freedom in the times of Economic Crisis – A Close Reading Of Margaret Atwood's The Heart Goes Last

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-154
Author(s):  
Ewelina Feldman-Kołodziejuk ◽  
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Margaret Atwood ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Economic Experiment ◽  
Experimental Project ◽  
The Times ◽  
Far Future

In her fifth dystopian novel, The Heart Goes Last, Margaret Atwood portrays North America in the not so far future, in the wake of a global economic crisis. Parts of the country are in the state of complete chaos, subjected to a ruthless gang rule. The solution to the system's breakdown comes in the form of the socio-economic experiment that requires from its participants relinquishing their freedom as every other month they will spend in prison. The seemingly preposterous experimental project enables Atwood to explore principal questions about the limits of our freedom in the times of an economic crisis or a neoliberal model of economy. The satirical form the novel takes, especially towards its end, helps the writer to decry people's over-willingness to give away their freedom and civil liberties in exchange for happy, uninterrupted consumption. The following article aims to demonstrate that the notion of freedom and free will permeate The Heart Goes Last, which is, in that respect, a politically and socially engaged satire.

scholarly journals Epilepsy, Forgetting, and Convalescence in Ondaatje’s Warlight

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Gresil S. Kahambing ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Short Circuit ◽  
Epileptic Seizures ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Health Humanities ◽  
Do So

Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight (2018), his latest novel to-date, contains nostalgic elements of strangeness and cartography. In this paper, I short-circuit such themes with health under medical humanities, which heeds a Nietzschean counsel of close reading in literature. To do so, I explore the case of Rachel’s illness, namely her epileptic seizures, as an instance that drives her impetus for active forgetting and eventual convalescence. A close hermeneutical reading of the novel can reveal that both of Nietzsche’s ideas on active forgetting and convalescence provide traction in terms of what this paper constructs as Rachel’s pathography or narration of illness. Shifting the focus from the main narrator, Nathaniel, I argue that it is not the novel’s reliance on memory but the subplot events of Nathaniel’s sister and her epilepsy that form a substantial case of medical or health humanities.

scholarly journals Aracoeli di Elsa Morante

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Silvia Camilotti
Keyword(s):  
Personal Experience ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Elsa Morante ◽  
Literary Device ◽  
Literary Devices

I propose a close reading of Elsa Morante’s latest book, Aracoeli, drawing upon three key literary devices: escapism, metamorphosis and paradox, which I use in relation to both the principal characters in the book, Aracoeli and her son Emanuele. Moreover, my reading will also bring to light the author’s personal experience and how it is relevant to the novel particularly in relation to the literary device of escapism.

scholarly journals Emotions vocabulary and the reconceptualisation of emotions in Ann Radcliffe’s “The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents”

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-58
Author(s):  
Elena D. Andonova-Kalapsazova
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Emotional Experience ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Emotional Experiences ◽  
Critical Studies ◽  
Francis Hutcheson ◽  
History Of

The article undertakes the analysis of Ann Radcliffe’s novel The Italian, or the Confessional of the Black Penitents (1797) from a history of literary emotions perspective which, I argue, yields insights into the attitudes towards emotions embedded in Radcliffe’s works. A reading of the novel from such a perspective also complements the critical studies of the artist’s engaging with the eighteenth-century cult of sensibility. The novel is read as a text that registered but also participated in the dissemination of an epistemology of emotional experience articulated in the idiom of eighteenth-century moral philosophers – Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith - at the same time as it retained some of the older, theology-based conceptions of passions and affections. The dynamic in which the two frameworks for understanding the emotions exist in the novel is explored through a close reading of the vocabulary in which Radcliffe rendered the emotional experiences of her fictional characters. In this reading it is the passions which are found to have been invested with a variety of meanings and attributed a range of moral valences that most noticeably foreground the movement from a generally negative towards a more complex appreciation of powerful emotions.

Alternative Literary Modernities: A Voice from Colonial Punjab

2018 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 35-48
Author(s):  
Arti Minocha
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Literary Culture ◽  
The Self ◽  
Subject Position ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Discursive Space ◽  
Political Subject ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Language Content

Abstract This paper looks at the formation of colonial print publics in Punjab, the gendered subjectivities that emerged in this new discursive space, and middle-class women’s deployment of print to articulate the self. This will be done through a close reading of one of the first novels in English, Cosmopolitan Hinduani, which was published in Lahore, Punjab, by a woman in 1902. The essay examines the narrator’s notion of a gendered cosmopolitanism and the subject position that it affords, her attempt at going beyond the fault lines of religion to articulate a liberal and modern political subject, while reworking the cosmopolitan/local binary. How does her insertion of herself as a gendered subject in the provincial, national, cosmopolitan imaginary reflect in the author’s choice of language and genre? My attempt will be to see the novel and its author as part of a literary culture in which she made certain choices about the form, language, content, and audience.

Murry, John Middleton (1889–1957)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shawna Ross
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Radical Politics ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Literary Magazines ◽  
Lower Middle Class ◽  
Internal Revenue ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
John Middleton Murry

John Middleton Murry, born in Peckham, London on 6 August 1889, was a prolific English writer best known today as the husband and literary executor of Katherine Mansfield. The son of an internal revenue clerk, determined to overcome his lower-middle-class surroundings, Murry won a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital, Sussex, and another to Brasenose College, Oxford, where he graduated with a first in Classics. He founded the journal Rhythm, beginning the editorial and critical labours that defined his reputation during his life. Murry edited a succession of literary magazines—most influentially, the Athanaeum. He steadily produced volumes of literary criticism, politics, religion, and other non-fiction until his death, drawing attention (and often ire) for his radical politics and his critical disagreements with T.S. Eliot.

War Work

Russomania ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 241-318
Author(s):  
Rebecca Beasley
Keyword(s):  
Russian Literature ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
British Government ◽  
Ballets Russes ◽  
The First World War ◽  
Travel Writings ◽  
John Middleton Murry ◽  
Western Civilisation ◽  
War Propaganda ◽  
First World

Alliance with tsarist Russia during the First World War presented a propaganda challenge for the British government: many believed that to support Russia against Germany was to support a barbarous nation against its own subjects, and to risk tipping the balance of power in Europe away from democracy. Russian literature was strategically deployed by the War Propaganda Bureau as evidence of Russia’s civilization, and writers and critics were marshalled to overturn the anti-tsarist interpretations of Russian literature put in place by the Russian populists. Russian literature now appeared in a new guise, read not through realism but symbolism, a movement introduced to Britain through the performances of the Ballets Russes, the travel writings of Stephen Graham, and reappraisals of Dostoevsky’s writings. The chapter concludes by examining the fiction of D. H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield, and John Middleton Murry, which resists wartime propaganda, and finds in Russian literature a critique of Western civilisation and its war.

Womb with a View

2020 ◽  
pp. 187-206
Author(s):  
Ally Wolfe
Keyword(s):  
New World ◽  
Significant Part ◽  
Duty Of Care ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Working Through ◽  
Brave New World

This chapter conducts a close reading of Lois McMaster Bujold’s ‘problem’ novel Ethan of Athos, in which an all-male world, Athos, is posited, reliant for reproduction on the ‘uterine replicator’ or artificial womb. Close reading demonstrates how the novel proves more complex than initial readings might suggest in its careful working-through of the ramifications of the uterine replicator for parenting, motherhood, and the duty of care towards the young. The chapter argues how the existence of Athos with the wider Vorkosigan series is significant, part of an ongoing and series-wide project by Bujold to demonstrate the range of possible futures that the uterine replicator might permit. At various points, Ethan of Athos is brought into conversation with Huxley’s Brave New World to contrast Bujold and Huxley’s visions of reproductive futurities. The chapter shows how Bujold’s saga-length project of creating a diverse science-fictional heterotopia involves a thorough working-through of the ramifications of the uterine replicator, of detaching reproduction from a gestational body, in which Ethan of Athos plays a necessary part.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document