Representations of Women in Selected Short Stories by Katherine Mansfield Viewed Through Seventeenth-century Genre Paintings

Tekstualia ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
pp. 35-52
Author(s):  
Anna Kwiatkowska
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Women Characters ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Representation Of Women ◽  
Female Protagonists ◽  
Old Masters ◽  
Representations Of Women

The goal of the paper is to demonstrate the influence of the Dutch masters on the representation of women in Mansfield’s short stories. The correspondences discernible between Mansfieldian women characters and the women figures from the Dutch Old Masters’ canvases as well as Dutch painters’ techniques dealing with perspective and Mansfield’s treatment of narration show a lot in common. When introducing her female protagonists, Mansfield seems to employ certain narrative strategies that are reminiscent of the techniques utilised by the Old Masters. The paper addresses, therefore, two issues. Firstly, it deals with a transmedial aspect of Mansfield’s stories and makes an inquiry into the question of how the writer endowed her female protagonists with the characteristics that echo the features of women painted by the seventeenth-century artists. And secondly, the paper tries to establish why Mansfield would resort to the Old Masters’ canvases while constructing her modern texts. Since the topic of Dutch influences in Mansfield’s works appears to be a complex one, the paper is but an introduction into a deeper and more thorough inquiry into the works of Katherine Mansfield in relation to the 17th century paintings.

scholarly journals Oh, Mother, Who Art Thou? : The Heart of Maternal Darkness in the Short Stories of Katherine Mansfield

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-89
Author(s):  
Anindita Sarkar
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Women Characters ◽  
Lived Experience ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Adrienne Rich ◽  
The Real ◽  
Mother Daughter Relationship ◽  
Cultural Construct ◽  
Traditional Assumption

Our culture assumes: No love is as great as that of a mother for her child. Motherhood has been perpetually associated with self-effacement and self-abnegation. Adrienne Rich while making a distinction between the actual lived experience of a mother and the institution of motherhood has argued that motherhood is a cultural construct and a far cry from the real experience of mothering. This article traces and examines representations of motherhood in the select short stories of Katherine Mansfield, in the light of Adrienne Rich’s theories in Of Woman Born. Much like Adrienne Rich, Mansfield discredits the traditional assumption that to be a mother is an essential pre-requisite to be a ‘real woman’. Mansfield’s women characters unleash a plurality of voices that aid the readers at viewing maternity as an ambiguous experience. Instead of romanticizing and idealizing the mother-daughter relationship, she offers a problematic connection between both the figures, often pitting them as rivals against each other. Her women characters progressively revolt from within the four walls of the household by their intermittent display of anger and deliberate attempts at failing to conform to the monolithic ideals of femininity.

'Barocke' Lyrik lesen

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dirk Werle
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Literary History ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Historical Understanding ◽  
Points Of View ◽  
Century Poetry ◽  
Pop Literature

How should one go about reading German 17th century poetry? Dirk Werle answers this question on the basis of a consistently historical understanding of both genre and epoch. In the seventeenth century, “poetry” had a decidedly different meaning from what we take it to be today, and there was no such thing as our term “Baroque”. For each of the chapter's introductory analyses, from which more general considerations and points of view are developed, poems have been selected that do not appear in relevant anthologies and therefore allow unbiased access to a fascinating field of literary history. The Author shows that 17th century poetry is characterized by a poetics of repetition, based on affinity to music and the principle of convivial play. It is a form of pop literature that does not directly refer to reality, but creates a poetic world all its own. To grasp this phenomenon, a “hermeneutics of simplicity” is called for, which is introduced and explained in this book.

The Album De Colbert: The Image of Shipbuilding

2021 ◽  
Vol 163 (A3) ◽  
Author(s):  
M Corradi
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Methodological Approach ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Royal Navy ◽  
Louis Xiv ◽  
Shipbuilding Industry ◽  
The World ◽  
The Creation

The Album de Colbert compiled by an anonymous author in the second half of the seventeenth century is among the most important illustrated testimonies of the art of shipbuilding. Probably commissioned by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Minister of Finance and Minister of the Navy of the kingdom of France, the Album was composed to make Louis XIV understand the complexity of shipbuilding. It was also made to support the creation of a navy with the ambition of being competitive with the Royal Navy and with the intent of modernising and expanding the French shipbuilding industry. The fifty plates that make up this illustrated treatise unravel the story of the construction of a first-rank 80-gun line vessel, from the laying of the keel to the launch. It is a unique document that has no contemporaries or precursors because it is not a didactic collection of boats, like the previous treaties that had a completely different methodological approach, more technical-descriptive than illustrative, but it wants to go beyond the scientific treatise. Its purpose was instead to measure itself with representation, showing through the strength of drawing and images the peculiar aspects of the reality of shipbuilding, using iconography as a means of transmitting knowledge related to the world of shipyards and shipbuilding in the 17th century.

scholarly journals Female Assertion as an Antidote to Male Dominance: Mother Archetypes in Achebe’s Novels—Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, and A Man of the People

2019 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 13-19
Author(s):  
Jeremiah Mutuku Muneeni
Keyword(s):  
Women Characters ◽  
Male Dominance ◽  
Unit Of Analysis ◽  
Representation Of Women ◽  
Gender Balance ◽  
The People ◽  
Archetypal Criticism ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Things Fall Apart ◽  
Intense Debate

There has been an intense debate with regards to Chinua Achebe’s (mis)representation of women in his creative works, especially his first four novels. Some scholars have argued that Achebe is a patriarchal writer who has relegated women to the periphery. Nevertheless, a few have read subtle nuances of gender balance in his works. This paper is a continuation of this debate. Specifically, it argues that Achebe has created Mother Archetypes in his novels and if the same is not recognized, he will continue to be demonized as a gender insensitive writer. The unit of analysis is three of the five Achebe’s novels namely: Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease, and A Man of the People. The paper interrogates the aforementioned novels within the framework of archetypal criticism, with the aim of unearthing and examining Mother Archetypes inherent in them. The paper identifies religion, education, and justice as the spheres of life in which Achebe has created, empowered and elevated Mother Archetypes to be at par with their male counterparts. However, owing to the breadth of the subject, the paper dwells on education. The paper concludes that creation of empowered Mother Archetypes in Achebe’s novels is a symbolic relay in which women characters hand in the symbolic empowerment baton to the next woman in the next novel until the last one where the creation of a woman major character, Beatrice, wins the race against male dominance.

scholarly journals A Monstrous Ideal

2020 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Robert Stearn
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Intermediate Position ◽  
Domestic Service ◽  
High Status ◽  
Written Materials

The paper suggests that 17th-century writers sometimes thought about disciplines, methods, and concepts as skilful, in the sense that these objects and processes held information, were used as tools to aid discrimination (where their use might also be skilful), and were the aggregated experience of people with skill as well as the product of their activities. The paper also suggests that servants were thought about in a similar way. Drawing on range of printed texts and a series of 'ideal servant' emblems from the 16th to the 18th century – in which servant chimeras and cyborgs appear with limbs and heads replaced by animal parts and/or inanimate objects connected with domestic service – the paper asks: in what ways did these materials place servants placed in relation to skill, or make them part of an institution in which one might be skilled, or part of a practice susceptible to modification by skill? The paper concludes by looking closely at a 1682 print and argues that it articulates a similar sense of skill as that found in 17th-century written materials. The print – in which a servant holds the tools of high-status arts in which one might be skilled, but servants were not – occupies an intermediate position between the emblematic servant of the sixteenth to mid-seventeenth century (whose capacities and attributes are expressed by the conventional significance of animals and tools) and the joke automaton maidservant of the eighteenth and nineteenth (made out of the objects around which and through which the work of domestic service takes place – the composite servant-body figures the energy of the living servant that puts them in motion).

scholarly journals EL LÉXICO DE LA VIDA COTIDIANA EN TIERRA DE CAMPOS EN EL SIGLO XVII (APEROS Y RECIPIENTES AGRÍCOLAS) = The daily lexicon in Tierra de Campos in the Seventeenth century (agricultural tools and containers)

2020 ◽  
pp. 59
Author(s):  
Marta Miguel Borge
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Everyday Life ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Agricultural Activity ◽  
Essential Tool ◽  
Historical Archives ◽  
People’S Daily ◽  
People's Daily

<p>No cabe duda de que los inventarios de bienes proporcionan una información muy valiosa sobre el léxico de la vida cotidiana. En nuestro caso, hemos realizado un muestreo en la comarca de Tierra de Campos en el siglo XVII. El corpus documental se configura a partir de protocolos notariales obtenido en los Archivos Históricos Provinciales de León, Palencia, Valladolid y Zamora. Estos inventarios constituyen una herramienta fundamental para conocer el léxico de los bienes y objetos que componían el día a día de las personas. En nuestro caso, el campo semántico estudiado se centra en la actividad agrícola.</p><p>There is no doubt that property inventories provide invaluable information about the lexicon of everyday life. In our case, we have carried out a sampling in the Tierra de Campos region (Castile and Leon, Spain) in the 17th century. The documentary corpus has been taken from the notarial protocols from the Provincial Historical Archives of León, Palencia, Valladolid, and Zamora. These inventories are an essential tool to find out the lexicon of the goods and objects of people's daily life. In our case, focused on agricultural activity.</p>

‘Forlorn on the Fringe of Life’: Exploring Working-Class Childhood in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories

2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Argha Kumar Banerjee
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Short Fiction ◽  
Verbal Abuse ◽  
The Other ◽  
Parental Rejection ◽  
Narrative Strategies ◽  
Childhood Experiences ◽  
The One

Abstract In Katherine Mansfield’s short story ‘Life of Ma Parker’, the old, widowed charwoman is plagued by ‘unbearable’ thoughts of her deceased grandson Lennie: ‘Why did he have to suffer so?’ Lennie’s unfortunate death in the story is not a solitary instance of tragic portrayal of working-class childhood in Mansfield’s short fiction. In several of her tales she empathetically explores the marginalized existence of such children, occasionally juxtaposing their deplorable existence with their elite counterparts’. From social exclusion, child labour, parental rejection, infant and child mortality on the one hand to physical and verbal abuse, bullying in the school and appalling living conditions on the other; Mansfield's exploration of the working-class childhood in her short fiction is not only psychologically complex but sociologically significant. Focusing on the relevant short stories in her oeuvre, this brief analysis intends to closely examine such depictions of marginalized childhood experiences, particularly in light of the oppressive societal conditions that validate their repressive alienation and sufferings. Tracing various biographical circumstances that may have fostered Mansfield’s deep empathy with the children’s’ predicament, this analysis also draws attention to her subtle oblique narrative strategies that effectively represent the plight of working-class children in a convincing and an ingeniously nuanced manner.

At Home Among the Russians: The Short Stories of Olive Garnett and Katherine Mansfield

2017 ◽  
pp. 107-124
Author(s):  
Frances Reading
Keyword(s):  
Short Stories ◽  
Common Interest ◽  
Fin De Siecle ◽  
Substantial Part ◽  
Great War ◽  
National Consciousness ◽  
Katherine Mansfield ◽  
Russian People ◽  
Fin De Siècle ◽  
At Home

The purpose of this article is to incorporate the little-studied writer, Olive Garnett, into the discussion surrounding Katherine Mansfield in relation to Russian themes. Both Mansfield and Garnett had a common interest in Russia and, writing in the same literary milieu, both wrote short stories about Russia and Russians. Where the interest in Russia comes from for Garnett and Mansfield forms a substantial part of this article. Both were influenced by various Russian radicals and philosophers, such as Nikolai Chernyshevsky who conceivably served to inspire the writing of both women. The context will stem from the ‘Russomania’ that took hold from the 1880s onwards, culminating in the subsequent fin-de-siècle and post-Great War paranoias within the British national consciousness which expressed itself in the form of prejudice towards the foreign Other. It will consider the influence Russia, and Russian people, had on the style and work of Mansfield and Garnett, and in turn reveal how both writers present Russia.

Bartering for Slaves on the Upper Guinea Coast in the Early Seventeenth Century

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
LINDA A. NEWSON
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Detailed Account ◽  
Guinea Coast ◽  
Trade Networks ◽  
Slave Traders ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Trading Network

In the context of debates about the definition and origins of globalisation and the role of African agency in the Atlantic slave trade, this chapter examines the commodities traded by Portuguese New Christian slave traders on the Upper Guinea coast in the early 17th century. Based on detailed account books of three slave traders discovered in the Inquisition section of the Archivo General de la Nación in Lima, Peru, it shows how Africans often determined the types and prices of goods exchanged and forced Europeans to adapt to local trade networks. Hence while commodities such as Indian textiles and beads reflected the position of the Portuguese slave traders in a global trading network, at the same time they were actively involved in trading locally produced cloth and beeswax as well as slaves.

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