This volume offers an introductory overview to the short stories of Katherine Mansfield, discussing a wide range of her most famous stories from different viewpoints. The book elaborates on Mansfield's themes and techniques, thereby guiding the reader - via close textual analysis - to an understanding of the author's modernist techniques.

This book is an examination of the narrative strategies and stylistic devices of modernist writers and of earlier writers normally associated with late realism. In the case of the latter, Edith Wharton, Kate Chopin and Willa Cather are shown to have engaged in an ironic critique of realism, by exploring the inadequacies of this form to express human experience, and by revealing hidden, and contradictory, assumptions. By drawing upon insights from feminist theory, deconstruction and revisions of new historicism, and by restoring aspects of formalist analysis, Kathleen Wheeler traces the details of these various dialogues with the literary tradition etched into structural, stylistic and thematic elements of the novels and short stories discussed. These seven writers are not only discussed in detail, they are also related to a literary tradition of dozens of other women writers of the twentieth century, as Jean Rhys, Katherine Mansfield, Stevie Smith and Jane Bowles are shown to take the developments of the earlier three writers into full modernism.

Reveals how Katherine Mansfield's understanding of art and music shaped and inspired her writingThis volume emphasises the centrality of Katherine Mansfield to the cultural life of her time, illuminating how her love of painting and of music inspired her art. The Fauvist paintings of the Scottish colourist F.D. Fergusson, the music of Debussy, and indeed, of Wagner, all helped to forge a precise aesthetic, founded above all on the intense study and - in the case of music - practice of artistic technique. The essays in this volume explore Mansfield's relationships with the visual arts and with music, bringing to light the way in which these helped to shape the formal qualities of her writing: its beauty of line and intensely musical effects. Mansfield's relationship with Woolf is also strongly in the frame. As befits a volume dedicated to the arts, there is an introduction, poetry and a new short story by highly-acclaimed writers who count Mansfield amongst their chief inspirations.

In 2009, Kirsty Gunn returned to spend the winter in her hometown of Wellington, New Zealand, also the place where Katherine Mansfield grew up. In this exquisitely written “notebook,” which blends memoir, biography, and essay, Gunn records that winter-long experience and the unparalleled insight it allowed her into Mansfield’s fiction. Gunn explores the idea of home and belonging—and of the profound influence of Mansfield’s work on her own creative journey. She asks whether it is even possible to “come home”—and who are we when we get there?

Reconsiders of Arendt's philosophy of natality in terms of biopolitical theory and feminism to defend women's reproductive choices

This volume offers new interpretations of Katherine Mansfield's work by bringing together recent biographical and critical-theoretical approaches to her life and art in the context of Continental Europe. It features chapters on Mansfield's reception in several European countries together with her own translations of other European writers.