Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture
Chris MourantKatherine Mansfield’s contemporaries knew her primarily as a contributor to magazines and periodicals. In 1922, for instance, Wyndham Lewis described her as ‘the famous New Zealand Mag.-story writer’. This book provides the first in-depth study of Mansfield’s engagement in periodical culture, examining her contributions to the political weekly The New Age, the avant-garde little magazine Rhythm and the literary journal The Athenaeum. Reading these writings against the editorial strategies and professional cultures of each periodical, Chris Mourant situates Mansfield’s work within networks of production and uncovers the many ways in which she engaged with the writings of others and responded to the political, aesthetic and social contexts of early twentieth-century periodical culture. By examining Mansfield’s ambivalent position as a colonial woman writer working both within and against the London literary establishment, in particular, this book provides a new perspective on Mansfield as a ‘colonial-metropolitan modernist’ and proto-postcolonial writer.
Key Features
- Foregrounds the original material contexts in which Mansfield produced the majority of her work, emphasising a dialogic or ‘conversational’ model for modernism
- Interrogates Mansfield’s ambivalent self-positioning within English literary circles as a ‘colonial-metropolitan modernist’ and ‘outsider’
- Integrates ideas of the recent ‘transnational turn’ across literary studies into the field of periodical scholarship
- Examines new archival findings