Includes a literary reflection on Mansfield's work by award-winning novelist Ali Smith. Katherine Mansfield: New Directions brings together leading international scholars to explore and celebrate the modernist short fiction writer, Katherine Mansfield. Reassessing Mansfield's life, work and reputation in the light of new research in literary modernism the book maps new directions for future Mansfield studies in the twenty-first century. Drawing on current work from postcolonial studies, eco-criticism, affect studies, book, periodical and manuscript studies, and auto/biographical and critical-theoretical approaches to her life and art as well as new archival discoveries, this is an essential contribution to our deepening understanding of a central modernist figure.

A revisionist study of Mansfield as a profoundly colonial yet daringly experimental writer, at the forefront of modernism. The essays in this volume draw on the complete journals, letters and stories, to reveal Mansfield as a modernist who transcended her artistic influences through a supreme understanding of voice, being and subjectivity.

This book considers Mansfield?s ambivalent position as a colonial woman writer by examining her contributions to the political weekly The New Age, the avant-garde little magazine Rhythm and the literary journal The Athenaeum.

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.

This book offers a new introduction to Katherine Mansfield's short stories focusing on the question of the connection between life and writing in her work. This book offers a new introduction to Katherine Mansfield's short stories informed by recent biographical, critical and editorial work on her life and on her stories, letters and notebooks. The study focuses on the question of the connection between life and writing in Mansfield's work: it explores her engagements with issues of personal identity and elaborates her theory and practice of a poetics of impersonation whereby the identity of the author is merged with those of her characters. Bennett argues that Mansfield's multiple and unstable identities and identifications are bound up with issues of colonialism, nationality, gender, and sexuality, and that they may be said to be embedded within the very texture of her prose. Mansfield's impersonations, in their engagement with a 'queer' aesthetics, with strangeness and surprise, with hatred, with

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

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) was one of the leading figures in the development of the modernist short story and her writings were a profound influence on writers such as Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence. Presenting for the first time draft manuscripts of some of her most important stories, this book gives scholars and students alike vivid new insight into Mansfield's creative process. With manuscripts for each text presented in facsimile and transcript, detailed notes throughout compare early drafts with later revisions and the final published work. In the final section of the book leading scholars offer vivid new critical readings exploring the manuscript history of these stories. A detailed descriptive listing of the major Mansfield archives is also included to help researchers explore the work further. The stories included are: 'Je ne parle pas francais'; 'Sun and Moon'; 'Revelations'; 'The Stranger'; 'The Daughters of the Late Colonel'; 'Mr and Mrs Dove'; 'Marriage à la Mode'; 'The Voyage'; 'Six Years After'; 'The Fly'.