In opposition to traditional interpretations of the period, Kaplan (English, U. of Washington) asserts that women writers were at the center rather than on the margins of British modernism. She examines Mansfield's contribution to modernist fiction; her struggles as a writer during the era of modernist experimentation; and such issues as the problematics of genre, the encoding of sexuality, and the critical debate over impersonality. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

"Ardis identifies the New Woman novel as an important locus of change at the turn of the century; a forum for the review of nineteenth-century narrative conventions; a forum for experimentation with new conceptualizations of sexuality and human character"--Back cover.

Katherine Mansfield's arrival in London in 1908 marked the start of her professional career as a writer and this study marks a revival of her reputation as one of the foremost practitioners of the short story. The international line-up of contributors attests to Mansfield's global appeal. By discussing her fiction in relation to her life, the contributors to this critical work present reinterpretations and readings. Enhanced by new transcriptions of manuscripts and access to her diaries and letters, these readings combine biographical approaches with critical-theoretical ones and focus not only on philosophy and fiction, but class and gender, biography/autobiography. The historical and aesthetic studies of Mansfield's work all take place within a framework of modernist literature, criticism and theory, thereby expanding our understanding of what it means to be a Modernist while allocating Mansfield a firm place in any current study of Modernism.

New analysis of Katherine Mansfield's contribution to modernism, above all her underexplored relationship with D.H. LawrenceKatherine Mansfield and Modernism is given a distinct focus in this volume by an emphasis on her under-explored relationship with D. H. Lawrence, to whom, both as artist and person, she felt herself uncannily alike. In addition to investigating Mansfield's literary and biographical relationship with Lawrence, the essays for this volume examine widely varied aspects of Mansfield's modernism including her modernist revision of fairy-tale motifs, and the aesthetic, psychological and political contexts for her work. Further essays place her within a broader international and cultural framework, analysing her important relationship with modernist 'little magazines' and demonstrating how Mansfield and other artists from beyond Europe formed and developed literary modernism. The volume contains a preface and new short stories and poems by internationally-esteemed writers. The relationship between Mansfield and Lawrence is also given dramatic form in an original play-script first published in this volume and based on the period during 1916 when Mansfield and Murry shared a pair of remote cottages with Frieda and D. H. Lawrence at Zennor in Cornwall.

Taking on the neglected issue of the short story's relationship to literary Modernism, Claire Drewery examines works by Katherine Mansfield, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair, and Virginia Woolf. Drewery argues that the short story as a genre is preoccupied with transgressing boundaries, and thus offers an ideal platform from which to examine the Modernist fascination with the liminal. Embodying both liberation and restriction, liminal spaces on the one hand enable challenges to traditional cultural and personal identities, while on the other hand they entail the inevitable negative consequences of occupying the position of the outsider: marginality, psychosis, and death. Mansfield, Richardson, Sinclair, and Woolf all exploit this paradox in their short fiction, which typically explores literal and psychological borderline states that are resistant to rational analysis. Thus, their short stories offered these authors an opportunity to represent the borders of unconsciousness and to articulate meaning while also conveying a sense of that which is unsayable. Through their concern with liminality, Drewery shows, these writers contribute significantly to the Modernist aesthetic that interrogates identity, the construction of the self, and the relationship between the individual and society.

This critical Reader is the essential companion to any course in twentieth-century literature. Drawing upon the work of a wide range of key writers and critics, the selected extracts provide: a literary-historical overview of the twentieth century insight into theoretical discussions around the purpose, value and form of literature which dominated the century closer examination of representative texts from the period, around which key critical issues might be debated. Clearly conveying the excitement generated by twentieth-century literary texts and by the provocative critical ideas and arguments that surrounded them, this reader can be used alongside the two volumes of Debating Twentieth-Century Literature or as a core text for any module on the literature of the last century. Texts examined in detail include: Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, Mansfield's Short Stories, poetry of the 1930s, Gibbon's Sunset Song, Eliot's Prufrock, Brecht's Galileo, Woolf's Orlando, Okigbo's Selected Poems, du Maurier's Rebecca, poetry by Ginsburg and O'Hara, Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Puig's Kiss of the Spiderwoman, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, Heaney's New Selected Poems 1966-1987, Gurnah's Paradise and Barker's The Ghost Road.

In this era, analysis of the West has become not only possible but mandatory. Where does this analysis leave those ethnic peoples whose entry into culture is, precisely because of the history of Western imperialism, already "Westernized"? This is the primary question Rey Chow addresses in "Woman and Chinese Modernity". The author brings together a variety of texts about modern China - from Bertolucci's "Last Emperor" and the "Mandarin Duck and Butterfly" stories, to writings by male and female authors of the May Fourth period - and organizes them along four critical paths all of which involve "woman". Those include the visual image, literary history, narrative structure and emotional reception. These, in turn, allow four mutually implicated aspects of "Chinese" modernity to come to the fore - the ethnic spectator, the fragmentation of tradition in popular literature, the problematic construction of a new "inner" reality through narration, and the relations between sexuality, sentimentalism and reading.