Re-Forming World Literature Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Short Story edited by Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson

Re-Forming World Literature Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Short Story edited by Gerri Kimber

and Janet Wilson is an ambitious book created and thought for re-define the correct space of Katherine Mansfield and her short stories in the modernism putting the author in comparison to the other writers of her own period, for seeing her own differencies, distances and similarities.

Considered a minor modernist, surely Katherine Mansfield added components in her short stories, pretty different from the rest of her contemporaries. That humanity that went lost with the time. 

The new short stories, the new novels produced by Modernists didn't have at all the compassion and feelings expressed in the past centuries. 

Wars, pandemic flu, a world in turmoil had kept these creatives away from certain sentimentalism. Katherine Mansfield in this sense was an exception: completely different from most of these writers she used her words for giving voice to servants, a new character taken in consideration just as an extention of the story, or snobbed by most of the other writers or treated with great distance. 

Waugh was clear: she said that she wasn't interested to write about poor people because, simply, she didn't mind, she didn't know them. 

Servants in Manfield's tales are people she treats with respect and without any kind of humor or irony in this sense, understanding the asperity of their existence. 

We can meet her tenderness, another treat absolutely absent in her contemporaries in her more famous short story, Bliss. Mansfield in short stories analyzed also mixed marriages and what it meant to ama couple: the asperity that these differences could bring thanks to a differenct culture or religion.

Oxford decided when they compiled an important anthology of british literature of keeping out from it Katherine Mansfield, although write the author of the essay, there are many visible signs of her "passage" in UK.

Another analysys involve the USA, but also children's stories that Mansfield created, thanks to her vivid imagination and a childhood spent reading and re-reading the fairy-tales of Brothers Grimm, Hans Christian Andersen but also other authors who would have heavily influenced her once adult. Mansfield added in fact an animistic touch in the stories that later she would have created.

It's a work this one that can be read per chapters, the most significant ones for you, or all together. 

It depends by the reasons you have decided to buy this book.

It could be for study, (you would surprise your teachetrs! implementing a lot what written in your school text!) or just because you love Katherine Mansfield and you want to discover more, thanks to the apport of scholars. 

I picked up the thematic I found more important, the ones that personally fascinated my person, the ones I wanted to explore more, finding also other good readings along the way.

Highly recommended.

I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori