Katherine Mansfield: A Literary Life

by Angela Smith

Overview

In a letter, Katherine Mansfield writes: 'I hate the sort of licence that English people give themselves - to spread over and flop and roll about. I feel as fastidious as though I write with acid'. This book explores Mansfield's idiosyncratic aesthetic by focusing on her position as an outsider in Britain: a New-Zealander, a woman writer, a Fuavist, and eventually a consumptive. Her sharp-edged fiction is discussed in relation to her involvement with Post-Impressionist painting and painters.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780333618783
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	10/03/2000
Series:	Literary Lives
Edition description:	2000
Pages:	171
Product dimensions:	5.51(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

ANGELA SMITH is Senior Lecturer in English Studies and Director of the Centre of Commonwealth Studies at the Universe of Sterling. She has taught at universities in California, Wales and Malawi. Her books include East African Writing in English, (ed) Jean Rhys Wide Sargasso Sea, and Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two.

Table of Contents

'I Live to Write' The Little Colonial: 1888-1908 A Born Actress and Mimic: August 1908 to November 1911 The Tiger: December 1911 to October 1915 Mansfield and Modernism: November 1915 to December 1918 The Secret Self: January 1919 to January 1923

Editorial Reviews

Traces Mansfield's artistic and intellectual development, specifically linking her engagement with post-impressionist art to readings of her most innovative and experimental stories. Smith (English studies, U. of Stirling, UK) focuses on Mansfield's position as a New Zealander who felt herself to be an outsider in British literary life to explore how Mansfield's idiosyncratic modernist aesthetic developed. Each chapter includes an analysis of a particular story or stories by Mansfield, to exemplify the stages of her shifting and disrupted development as a writer. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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