Katherine Mansfield and Modernism

Published 31 October 2010

New analysis of Katherine Mansfield's contribution to modernism, above all her underexplored relationship with D.H. Lawrence

Katherine 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.