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. 

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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.