Katherine Mansfield in a Global Context

Summary

Claire Davison and Gerri Kimber (eds), Katherine Mansfield's French Lives (Leiden: Brill Rodopi, 2016), 280 pp., L72. ISBN 978 90 04 28368 8

Kirsty Gunn, My Katherine Mansfield Project (Devon: Notting Hill Editions, 2015), 148 pp., L14.99. ISBN 978 1 910749 04 3

Andrew Harrison, The Life of D. H. Lawrence: A Critical Biography (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2016), 472 pp., L60. ISBN 978 0 470 65478 1

Peter J. Kalliney, Modernism in a Global Context (London: Bloomsbury, 2016), 190 pp., L21.99. ISBN 978 1 4725 6965 3

Gerri Kimber and Claire Davison (eds), The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, Volume 4: The Diaries of Katherine Mansfield Including Miscellaneous Works (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2016), 520 pp., L175. ISBN 9780748685059

Caroline Maclean, The Vogue for Russia: Modernism and the Unseen in Britain 1900–1930 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 240 pp., L70. ISBN 978 0 7486 4729 3

Lucy McDiarmid, Poets and the Peacock Dinner: The Literary History of a Meal (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 240 pp., L25. ISBN 978 0 19 872278 6

All of the works gathered here contribute to conversations about transnational modernism. Some bear directly on Mansfield's life and work, while others mention Mansfield or provide important contexts for her literary achievement. In Prose of the World: Modernism and the Banality of Empire, Saikat Majumdar, drawing on Claire Tomalin's biography of Mansfield, writes of New Zealand as the ‘most extreme margin of empire’ (75). That position of extreme marginality helps shape recent understandings of Mansfield's work as modernist in a ‘global context’. For Majumdar, the defining emotion and aesthetic qualities of that extreme margin are boredom and banality. Majumdar argues that the edge of empire produces dichotomies: between barrenness and plenitude, colonial backwater and metropolitan eventfulness. The infertile here produces longing for the promising there. ‘There’ would be the modern metropolis: in particular for Mansfield, London and Paris. The margins of Western modernity create subjects for whom the relentless drive is towards the city; Majumdar is hardly the first, nor will he be the last, to observe this metropolitan allure.

The books under consideration here allow us to ponder a range of situations in which this dynamic plays out or needs to be rethought. Some modernists, of course, fervently sought out the margin, in reaction against the centre.