Katherine Mansfield was a formidable critic: astute, witty and something more - she had, as Middleton Murry put it, an extraordinary style and critical verve, mastery and 'sureness of touch'. This is the first scholarly edition of her critical writings. A substantial introduction sets the scene for an understanding of Katherine Mansfield's position as a woman writer on the edge of, but never completely accepted by, Bloomsbury; responding to the pressures of the First World War, illness and exile, and attempting to reconcile the facts of life with the truths of fiction. Careful annotation supplies essential information for following the evolution of her ideas - and her art - from 1907 until her death in 1923.

Katherine Mansfield's non-fiction collected in one volume for the first time

Through her formally innovative and psychologically insightful short stories, Katherine Mansfield is increasingly recognised as one of the central figures in early 20th-century modernism. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars and covering her complete body of work, this is the most comprehensive volume to Mansfield scholarship available today. The Bloomsbury Handbook to Katherine Mansfield covers the full range of contemporary scholarly themes and approaches to the author's work, including: · New biographical insights, including into the early New Zealand years · Responses to the historical crises: the Great War, empire and orientalism · Mansfield's fiction, poetry, criticism and private writing · Mansfield and modernist culture – from Bloomsbury to the little magazines · Mansfield and her contemporaries – Woolf, Lawrence and von Arnim · Mansfield and the arts – visual culture, cinema and music The book also includes a substantial annotated bibliography of key works of Mansfield scholarship from the last 30 years.

The New Zealand-born writer Katherine Mansfield associated intimately with many members of the Bloomsbury group, but her literary aesthetics placed her at a distance from the artistic works of the group. With chapters written by leading international scholars, Katherine Mansfield and the Bloomsbury Group explores this conflicted relationship. Bringing together biographical and critical studies, the book examines Mansfield's relationships – personal and literary – with such major Modernist figures as Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, Aldous Huxley and Walter de la Mare as well as the ways in which her work engaged with and reacted against Bloomsbury. In this way the book reveals the true extent of Mansfield's wider influence on 20th-century modernist writing.

Focussing upon both canonical figures such as Woolf, Eliot, Pound, and Stein and emergent themes such as Christian modernism, intermedial modernism, queer Harlem Renaissance, this volume brings together previously unseen materials, from various archives, to bear upon cutting-edge interpretation of modernism. It provides an overview of approaches to modernism via the employment of various types of primary source material: correspondence, manuscripts and drafts, memoirs and production notes, reading notes and marginalia, and all manner of useful contextualising sources like news reports or judicial records. While having much to say to literary criticism more broadly, this volume is closely focused upon key modernist figures and emergent themes in light of the discipline's 'archival turn' – termed in a unifying introduction 'achivalism'. An essential ingredient separating the above, recent tendency from a much older and better-established new historicism, in modernist studies at least, is that 'the literary canon' remains an important starting point. Whereas new historicism 'is interested in history as represented and recorded in written documents' and tends toward a 'parallel study of literature and non-literary texts', archival criticism tends toward recognised, oftentimes canonical or critically-lauded, writers, presented in Part 1. Sidestepping the vicissitudes of canon formation, manuscript scholars tend to gravitate toward leading modernist authors: James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Virginia Woolf, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Eliot and Samuel Beckett. Part of the reason is obvious: known authors frequently leave behind sizeable literary estates, which are then acquired by research centres. A second section then applies the same empirical methodology to key or emergent themes in the study of modernism, including queer modernism; spatial modernism; little magazines (and online finding aids structuring them); and the role of faith and/or emotions in the construction of 'modernism' as we know it.

This book maps the ecologies of Mansfield's influences beyond her modernist and postcolonial contexts, observing that it roams wildly over six centuries, across three continents and beyond cultural and linguistic boundaries.

Katherine Mansfield's arrival in London in 1908 marked the start of her professional career as a writer and this study marks a revival of her reputation as one of the foremost practitioners of the short story. The international line-up of contributors attests to Mansfield's global appeal. By discussing her fiction in relation to her life, the contributors to this critical work present reinterpretations and readings. Enhanced by new transcriptions of manuscripts and access to her diaries and letters, these readings combine biographical approaches with critical-theoretical ones and focus not only on philosophy and fiction, but class and gender, biography/autobiography. The historical and aesthetic studies of Mansfield's work all take place within a framework of modernist literature, criticism and theory, thereby expanding our understanding of what it means to be a Modernist while allocating Mansfield a firm place in any current study of Modernism.

This volume offers new interpretations of Katherine Mansfield's work by bringing together recent biographical and critical-theoretical approaches to her life and art in the context of Continental Europe. It features chapters on Mansfield's reception in several European countries together with her own translations of other European writers.

New scholarly assessments of Katherine Mansfield's relationships with Continental Europe and the European reception of her workThe inaugural volume of Katherine Mansfield Studies illuminates Mansfield's literary and personal relationships with Continental Europe. The essays explore Mansfield's absorption of French literature and thought, highlighting affinities with Henri Bergson's interpretations of consciousness and with the writings of Marcel Proust. There are important insights into the memorable letters written by Mansfield whilst trapped in Paris under German Bombardment in 1918. Beyond France, we are offered an intriguing view of Mansfield's literary and critical afterlife in Czechoslovakia, and of the cosmopolitanism that characterised her entire life and writing. Also in this volume - appearing in the wake of the publication of the final volume of her collected letters - Mansfield's own practice as a reviewer is explored as a counter-balance to her current critical reception. With a preface by a distinguished editor and scholar of Mansfield and a rich creative writing section that includes work by several eminent New Zealand writers.