Book News: Critical takes on and creative homages to Mansfield's short fiction

 Katherine Mansfield and The Garden Party and Other Stories

EDITED BY GERRI KIMBER AND TODD MARTIN

Edinburgh UP, 2022

ISBN: 9781399509947

https://edinburghuniversitypress.com/book-katherine-mansfield-and-the-garden-party-and-other-stories.html

The last collection of short stories published in her lifetime, The Garden Party and Other Stories would solidify Katherine Mansfield’s place as the most prominent modernist short story writer of her generation. Early reviewers of the collection commented on the similarities it shared with her previous collection, Bliss and Other Stories; however, while contemporary reviews were mixed, many emphasized the psychological power of her stories, praising how she was able to bring her characters to life in a way simple action could not. While it contains some of Mansfield’s most sophisticated and well-loved stories, several of the stories in The Garden Party initially appeared in the Sphere, and thus were often dismissed as inferior. Mansfield herself felt some of these stories fell short of her desired effect, though recent scholarship has revealed their greater complexity. 

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

The essays in this volume, by both seasoned and newer Mansfield scholars, work to continue this conversation. The collection also includes Mansfield-inspired short fiction, two translations of memorial poems dedicated to Mansfield by Chinese and French contemporaries with accompanying notes, and a recently re-discovered book review by Mansfield. In addition, Sydney Janet Kaplan provides a reflection on her personal meeting with Christopher Isherwood, a writer heavily influenced by the life and work of Mansfield.

Content includes:

CRITICISM

Redefining ‘Photographic Realism’ in the Short Fiction of Katherine Mansfield

Daisy Birch

Knowing What We Feel about Katherine Mansfield: Sentimentality and Expression in ‘The Garden Party’

Jay Dickson

Dickens, Death and Mary Ann: Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Life of Ma Parker’

Martin Griffiths

‘Passion in Movement’: Katherine Mansfield – Gesture, Motion, and Dance

Richard Cappuccio

Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Marriage à la Mode’: ‘far too facile’?

Anna Kwiatkowska

The Quest for Autonomy Amid Shifting Gender Expectations and Relationships in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories

Calvin Goh

‘Forgive my Hat’: Clothing as a Condition of Narratability in The Garden Party and Other Stories

Samantha Dewally

Katherine Mansfield’s Desperate Housewives and Metonymic Desire

Sovay Hansen

‘If only one had time to look at these flowers long enough, time to get over the sense of novelty and strangeness’: The Political Language of Flowers in Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party and Other Stories

Sharon Gordon

CREATIVE WRITING

‘How Loud the Birds’

Ailsa Cox

‘The Marquee’

Paula McGrath

‘Endless Sea’

Bronwyn Calder

Twenty Immortal Minutes: A Poem by Xu Zhimo

Stuart Lyons

A Poem by Philippe Chabaneix

Gerri Kimber

CRITICAL MISCELLANY

Returning to ‘Kathy’: Christopher Isherwood’s Katherine Mansfield Fascination

Sydney Janet Kaplan

Katherine Mansfield’s Daily Herald Review of Joseph Conrad’s The Rescue

John G. Peters

REVIEW ESSAY

Redrawing Katherine Mansfield’s Critical Horizons

Elyse Blankley

Gerri Kimber is a visiting professor in the Department of English at the University of Northampton and is co-editor of the annual yearbook Katherine Mansfield Studies. She is the deviser and series editor of the four-volume Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield (2016) and the author of Katherine Mansfield: The View from France and A Literary Modernist: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story.

A professor of English at Huntington University, Todd Martin’s primary areas of interest are twentieth century British and American literature. He has published articles on such varied authors as John Barth, E. E. Cummings, Clyde Edgerton, Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat, Sherwood Anderson and Katherine Mansfield. He is the editor of the forthcoming Katherine Mansfield and the Bloomsbury Group.

Book News: Interviews with award-winning Afrofuturist Nalo Hopkinson

Conversations with Nalo Hopkinson

EDITED BY ISIAH LAVENDER III

UP of Mississippi, 2022

ISBN: 9781496843678

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/C/Conversations-with-Nalo-Hopkinson

A key figure in contemporary speculative fiction, Jamaican-born Canadian Nalo Hopkinson (b. 1960) is the first Black queer woman as well as the youngest person to be named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America. Her Caribbean-inspired narratives—Brown Girl in the Ring, Midnight Robber, The Salt Roads, The New Moon’s Arms, The Chaos, and Sister Mine—project complex futures and complex identities for people of color in terms of race, sex, and gender. Hopkinson has always had a vested interest in expanding racial and ethnic diversity in all facets of speculative fiction from its writers to its readers, and this desire is reflected in her award-winning anthologies. Her work best represents the current and ongoing colored wave of science fiction in the twenty-first century.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

In twenty-one interviews ranging from 1999 until 2021, Conversations with Nalo Hopkinson reveals a writer of fierce intelligence and humor in love with ideas and concerned with issues of identity. She provides powerful insights on code-switching, race, Afrofuturism, queer identities, sexuality, Caribbean folklore, and postcolonial science fictions, among other things. As a result, the conversations presented here very much demonstrate the uniqueness of her mind and her influence as a writer.

Isiah Lavender III is Sterling-Goodman Professor of English at the University of Georgia, where he researches and teaches courses in African American literature and science fiction. He is author of Afrofuturism Rising: The Literary Prehistory of a Movement; editor of Black and Brown Planets: The Politics of Race in Science Fiction and Dis-Orienting Planets: Racial Representations of Asia in Science Fiction, both published by University Press of Mississippi; and coeditor of Literary Afrofuturism in the Twenty-First Century.

Book News: Women modernists challenging gendered ideas of the senses

 

Dissensuous Modernism: Women Writers, the Senses, and Technology

BY ALLYSON C. DEMAAGD

UP of Florida, 2022

ISBN: 9780813069166

https://upf.com/book.asp?id=9780813069166

Placing women writers at the center of the sensory and technological experimentation that characterized the modernist movement, Dissensuous Modernism shows how women of the era challenged gendered narratives that limited their power and agency and waged dissent through their radical sensuous writing.  

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Allyson DeMaagd critiques an overemphasis among modernist writers and generations of researchers on the “masculine” senses of sight and sound, shifting the conversation toward the “feminine” senses of smell, taste, and touch. These senses, long considered “lower,” were explored by writers such as H.D., Mina Loy, Virginia Woolf, and Elizabeth Bowen, as DeMaagd demonstrates through detailed close readings of their lesser-studied novels. DeMaagd’s analysis shows how these women incorporated technology in their work to reunify the senses or to draw attention to the destructive disunity of the senses, highlighting the subversive potential of sensory integration.            

Dissensuous Modernism illuminates how modernist women writers breached the sensory borders society erects between men and women, heteronormativity and queerness, ability and disability, technology and nature, and human and nonhuman. It elevates diverse embodied experiences and illuminates the pivotal role of women in modernist sensory thought.  

“DeMaagd’s timely study examines the changing sensescape in modernist aesthetics and gives the long-denigrated ‘lower’ senses of smell, taste, and touch their interpretive due, not only uncovering the gendering of sensory experience but also demonstrating the extent to which sensory practices crucially involve questions of class, sexual orientation, (dis)ability, and species.”—Vicki Tromanhauser, SUNY New Paltz  

“Redressing the focus on visual senses that has dominated discussions of modernist (usually male) writers, Dissensuous Modernism argues that these modernist women writers call upon the underacknowledged senses of touch, feel, and smell in questioning gendered hierarchies of embodied and institutional power.”—Linda A. Kinnahan, editor of A History of Twentieth-Century American Women’s Poetry  

Allyson C. DeMaagd is an independent scholar and college success manager at Mid-Shore Scholars.

Book News: Lyotard's groundbreaking lectures on "infantia" now in English

Readings in Infancy

BY JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD

EDITED BY ROBERT HARVEY AND KIFF BAMFORD

Bloomsbury Academic, 2023

ISBN: 9781350167360

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/readings-in-infancy-9781350167360/

"Nobody knows how to write." Thus opens this carefully nuanced and accessible collection of essays by one of the most important writer-philosophers of the twentieth century, Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998). First published in French in 1991 as Lectures d'enfance, these essays have never been printed as a collection in English. In them, Lyotard investigates his idea of infantia, or the infancy of thought that resists all forms of development, either human or technological.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Each essay responds to works by writers and thinkers who are central to cultural modernism, such as James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Hannah Arendt, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Sigmund Freud. This volume – with a new introduction and afterword by Robert Harvey and Kiff Bamford – contextualizes Lyotard's thought and demonstrates his continued relevance today.

Contents include:

• Foreword, Robert Harvey 
• "Infans," translated by Mary Lydon
• "Return: Joyce," translated by Robert Harvey & Mark S. Roberts.
• "Prescription: Kafka," translated by Christopher Fynsk
• "Survivor: Arendt," translated by Robert Harvey & Mark S. Roberts
• "Words: Sartre," translated by Jeffrey Mehlman
• "Disorder: Valéry," translated by Robert Harvey
• "Voices: Freud," translated by Georges Van Den Abbeele
• Afterword, Kiff Bamford 

Robert Harvey is distinguished professor emeritus at Stony Brook University. His most recent books are Sharing Common Ground: A Space for Ethics (Bloomsbury, 2017) (translations in Japanese and French forthcoming in 2020), a translation of Deguy's To That Which Ends Not: Threnody (Spuyten Duyvil, 2018), Witnessness: Beckett, Levi, Dante and the Foundations of Ethics (Continuum, 2010), which appeared in French as Témoignabilité (MetisPresses, 2015), and De l’exception à la règle (Éditions Lignes, 2006) on USA PATRIOT Act. He is a major co-editor of the Œuvres complètes of Marguerite Duras in the Pléiade edition with Gallimard.

Kiff Bamford is reader in contemporary art at Leeds Beckett University, with research interests in performance art and continental philosophy. He has published widely on the work of French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard with a focus on the inter-relationship between art and philosophy. Monographs include: Jean-François Lyotard: Critical Lives (Reaktion, 2017) and  Lyotard and the figural in Performance, Art and Writing (Continuum, 2012). Bamford edited and introduced the collection Jean-François Lyotard: The Interviews and Debates (Bloomsbury, 2020). 

Book News: Women modernists' collaborations with men

 Modernist Literary Collaborations between Women and Men

BY RUSSELL MCDONALD

Cambridge UP, 2022

ISBN: 9781009070973

https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/modernist-literary-collaborations-between-women-and-men/

Major figures including W. B. Yeats, Marianne Moore, D. H. Lawrence, Ford Madox Ford, and Virginia Woolf viewed "cross-sex" collaboration as a valuable, and often subversive, strategy for bringing women and men's differing perspectives into productive dialogue while harnessing the creative potential of gendered discord. This study is the first to acknowledge collaboration between women and men as an important part of the modernist effort to "make it new." 

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Drawing on current methods from textual scholarship to read modernist texts as material, socially constructed products of multiple hands, the study argues that cross-sex collaboration involved writers working not just with each other, but also with publishers and illustrators. By documenting and tracing the contours of their desire for cross-sex collaboration, we gain a new understanding of the modernists' thinking about sex and gender relations, as well as three related topics of great interest to them: marriage, androgyny, and genius.

Russell McDonald is associate professor of English at Georgian Court University. His articles and reviews have appeared in Textual Cultures, Irish Studies Review, Twentieth-Century Literature, New Hibernia Review, and Comparative Literature Studies.

Book News: Charting new territories in Rhys studies

Transnational Jean Rhys: Lines of Transmission, Lines of Flight

Edited by Juliana Lopoukhine, Frédéric Regard, and Kerry-Jane Wallart

Bloomsbury Academic, 2022

ISBN: 9781501371653

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/transnational-jean-rhys-9781501371653/

This volume investigates the frameworks that can be applied to reading Caribbean author Jean Rhys. While Wide Sargasso Sea famously displays overt forms of literary influences, Jean Rhys's entire oeuvre is so fraught with connections to other texts and textual practices across geographical boundaries that her classification as a cosmopolitan modernist writer is due for reassessment.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Transnational Jean Rhys argues against the relative isolationism that is sometimes associated with Rhys's writing by demonstrating both how she was influenced by a wide range of foreign – especially French – authors and how her influence was in turn disseminated in myriad directions. Including an interview with Black Atlantic novelist Caryl Phillips, this collection charts new territories in the influences on/of an author known for her dislike of literary coteries, but whose literary communality has been underestimated.

Juliana Lopoukhine is senior lecturer in English studies at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, France. She has published various chapters and articles on women modernist writers (Virginia Woolf, Jean Rhys, Rose Macaulay), a critical edition of Mrs Dalloway (2013), and co-edited three issues of L’Atelier (2016, 2019, 2020). She wrote her doctoral dissertation under the supervision of Chantal Delourme and Scott McCracken and received her PhD from the Université de Paris-Nanterre, France and Keele University, UK.

Frédéric Regard is professor of 19th- and 20th-century English literature at the University of Paris-Sorbonne, France. He is the author of books on William Golding, George Orwell, Virginia Woolf, and 'feminine writing', as well as countless peer-reviewed articles. He also edited collections of essays on life-writing and exploration narratives. His latest work, Le Détective était une femme (2018), bears on gender issues in the genesis of the detective novel as a genre.

Kerry-Jane Wallart is professor in Black Atlantic studies at the University of Orléans, France. Her Alma Mater is the École Normale Supérieure Ulm and she has been a Procter Fellow at Princeton University. She has published over 30 book chapters and articles, co-edited an issue of Sillages Critiques (2019), an issue of Revue de Littérature Comparée (2017), a volume on Jamaica Kincaid, published by Wagadu in 2018, and edited three issues of Commonwealth Essays and Studies (2019, 2012 and 2009).

Book News: Creative writing programs, rebels in the academy

Literary Rebels: A History of Creative Writers in Anglo-American Universities

BY LISE JAILLANT

Oxford UP, 2023

ISBN: 9780192855305

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/literary-rebels-9780192855305

How many times have you heard that creative writing programs are factories that produce the same kind of writers, isolated from real life? Only by escaping academia can writers be completely free. Universities are profoundly conservative places, designed to favor a certain way of writing--preferably informed by literary theory. Those who reject the creative/ critical discourse of academia are the true rebels, condemned to live (or survive) in a tough literary marketplace. Conformity is on the side of academia, the story goes, and rebellion is on the other side.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

This book argues against the notion that creative writing programs are driven by conformity. Instead, it shows that these programs in the United States and Britain were founded and developed by literary outsiders, who left an enduring mark on their discipline. To this day, creative writing occupies a marginal position in Anglo-American universities. The multiplication of new programs, accompanied by rising student enrolments, has done nothing to change that positioning. 

As a discipline, creative writing strives on opposition to the mainstream university, while benefiting from what the university has to offer. Historically, this opposition to scholars was so virulent that it often led to the separation of creative writing and literature departments. The Iowa Writers' Workshop, founded in the 1930s, separated from the English department three decades later--and it still occupies a different building on campus, with little communication between writers and scholars. This model of institutional division is less common in Britain, where the discipline formally emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. But even when creative writing is located within literature departments, relationships with scholars remain uneasy. Creative writers and scholars are not, and have never been, natural bedfellows.

• The first history of creative writing programs in Britain and America
• Sheds new light on the relationship between writers and scholars from the 1930s to the present day
• Draws on extensive work in neglected archives and oral history interviews with distinguished creative writers
• Offers a new model of scholarship in hybrid archives, comprising paper and born-digital documents

Lise Jaillant is senior lecturer (associate professor) in the School of Social Sciences and Humanities at Loughborough University. She specializes in twentieth-century literary institutions, with a special interest in publishers and creative writing programs. She is author of Modernism, Middlebrow and the Literary Canon: The Modern Library Series, 1917-1955 (Routledge, 2014) and Cheap Modernism: Expanding Markets, Publishers' Series and the Avant-Garde (EUP, 2017) and editor of Publishing Modernist Fiction and Poetry (EUP, 2019). Taken together, these three books offer a broad overview of Anglo-American publishers in the early-twentieth-century, and their influence on the diffusion of modern literature.

Book News: Southern women writers' short story collections and their framing strategies

Arranging Stories: Framing Social Commentary in Short Story Collections by Southern Women Writers

BY HEATHER A. FOX

UP of Mississippi, 2022

ISBN: 9781496840516 hardcover, 9781496840509 paperback

https://www.upress.state.ms.us/Books/A/Arranging-Stories

A riveting history of how southern women writers negotiated authorial control in the late nineteenth- through early twentieth-century periodical market

Between the 1880s and the 1940s, opportunities for southern white women writers increased dramatically, bolstered by readers’ demands for southern stories in northern periodicals. Confined by magazine requirements and social expectations, writers often relied on regional settings and tropes to attract publishers and readers before publishing work in a collection. Selecting and ordering magazine stories for these collections was not arbitrary or dictated by editors, despite a male-dominated publishing industry. Instead, it allowed writers to privilege stories, or to contextualize a story by its proximity to other tales, as a form of social commentary. For Kate Chopin, Ellen Glasgow, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Katherine Anne Porter—the authors featured in this book—publishing a volume of stories enabled them to construct a narrative framework of their own.

BOOK NEWS is an online-only feature announcing new publications in modernist and contemporary literary studies. These announcements do NOT constitute an endorsement by the Journal of Modern Literature.

Arranging Stories: Framing Social Commentary in Short Story Collections by Southern Women Writers is as much about how stories are constructed as how they are told. The book examines correspondence, manuscripts, periodicals, and first editions of collections. Each collection’s textual history serves as a case study for changes in the periodical marketplace and demonstrates how writers negotiated this marketplace to publish stories and garner readership. The book also includes four tables, featuring collected stories’ arrangements and publication histories, and twenty-five illustrations, featuring periodical publications, unpublished letters, and manuscript fragments obtained from nine on-site and digital archives. Short story collections guide readers through a spatial experience, in which both individual stories and the ordering of those stories become a framework for interpreting meaning. Arranging Stories invites readings that complicate how we engage collected works.

"Drawing heavily on archival materials, including reproductions of many photographs, letters, manuscript pages, and other materials, Arranging Stories is a treasure trove of previously unreleased materials that sheds important light on these authors and their works. It draws attention to the amount of agency that these authors wielded over their work, in ways that we haven't previously considered."  - Monica Carol Miller, author of Being Ugly: Southern Women Writers and Social Rebellion

"With impeccable research, Arranging Stories reveals the struggles of early women writers working for acceptance and agency within a patriarchal publishing world dominated by White men."  - Donna Meredith, Southern Literary Review

Heather A. Fox is assistant professor of English at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond. Her work in southern studies has appeared in south, Southern Studies, Janus Head, The Explicator, and the Faulkner Journal.