Katherine Mansfield and Germany Influences, Interactions, Afterlives
Produktdetaljer
Om bidragsyterne
Janet M. Wilson is professor emeritus of English and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Northampton, UK. Her research focuses on the diaspora and postcolonial writing of the settler colonies of Australasia, as well as refugee writing, the global novel, transnationalism, and transculturalism. From 2010-2020 she was Vice-Chair of the Katherine Mansfield Society. Her most recent publications are “‘Being at sea’: Sea Journeys in ‘The Stranger,’ ‘The Voyage,’ and ‘Six Years After’”, in Selected Stories of Katherine Mansfield: A Manuscript Critical Edition, edited by Todd Martin (2023), and “Broadcasting the Stories of Katherine Mansfield: The BBC Written Archive Centre”, in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modernist Archives, edited by Jamie Callison et al (2024).
Tracy Miao is Associate Professor at Xi’an International Studies University in China. She was the winner of Katherine Mansfield Society’s 2020 Essay Prize, and the winning essay “Casting a ‘haunting light’: Katherine Mansfield’s Modernist Vision of Childhood” was published in Katherine Mansfield Studies Vol.13 (2021). Her publications include “Katherine Mansfield and the East” in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Katherine Mansfield (2020), and “Waves and ‘moment[s] of suspension’: Katherine Mansfield’s Painterly and Kinetic Language in Fiction” in Katherine Mansfield: International Approaches (2022).
<p>"Katherine Mansfield was not her ‘real’ name, but in Germany she chose to have another. What was she doing there, in disguise in a little spa town, married to one man but pregnant to another, submitting herself to the hosings, the ‘overbody wash’, the barefoot walking and vegetarian diet, observing the locals with a wickedly comic yet accurate and essentially charitable eye, and writing brilliant stories about them which she would come to dismiss, wrongly many believe, as ‘juvenile’. There has always been so much mystery about this early period in the life of one destined to ‘alter for good and all our notion of what goes to make a story’ (Elizabethe Bowen), to influence the writing and elicit the envy of Virginia Woolf, to help define by example what is meant by the term ‘literary Modernism’, and to cement herself for ever into the literary consciousness of her homeland, New Zealand. It is to Worishofen her mother brings the young Katherine in 1909, leaving her there to deal with her predicament alone, and returning home to New Zealand to strike her unmanageable daughter out of her will. There more than a hundred years later a small iron statue of Katherine sits reading beside a pond in a woodsy park, a town square bears her name, and a collocation of international scholars gathers to discuss and read papers about the mysteries of her sojourn ‘in a German pension’. The present book publishes their deliberations."</p><p><b>--C.K. Stead, ONZ, CBE, FRSL, Professor Emeritus, University of Auckland </b></p><p>"This elegant and timely volume brings into focus Mansfield’s creative process as it emerged through crucial encounters, influences, and exchanges, from her earliest engagement with 19th century German music and poetry to her legacy in the German Democratic Republic. <i>Katherine Mansfield and Germany</i> contributes new understandings of modernism’s locations and its cultural formations. The essays and introduction are written with inspiring liveliness, sophistication and clarity, making this volume a pleasure to read and learn from."</p><p><b>--Rishona Zimring, Professor of English, Lewis & Clark College</b></p><p>"Katherine Mansfield has long been recognised as a writer whose sensibilities were shaped by transnational, transcultural influences and imaginaries. <i>Katherine Mansfield and Germany </i>maps an aspect to this expansive worldview that has been deserving of far greater attention. The early stories Mansfield first published in the journal <i>The New Age</i>,<i> </i>based on her seven-month stay in Germany, receive especially insightful re-readings. What emerges across this book is a deeper understanding of the ways in which Mansfield was energised by other national literatures and cross-cultural exchanges." </p><p><b>--Chris Mourant, Lecturer in 20th Century Literature, University of Birmingham</b></p>
Katherine Mansfield and Germany is the first study of Mansfield's encounter with Germany and all things German: language, culture, society. This crucial area of her life and art has been relatively neglected, even though Germany held Mansfield in its thrall all her life, as myriad associations found in her fiction, notebooks, and letters confirm. Her immersion in the German language and culture was formative, influencing her early poetry and experimental prose writing, and as stories published in her first book In a German Pension (1911) show, was an important foundation for her cosmopolitan, (post)colonial modernism.
The 13 essays here offer insights onto the German intellectual and artistic heritages of the early 20th century that influenced Mansfield: Nietzsche in philosophy, the music of Wagner, the German Minnesänger and poetry, Heine's lyric verse, and German folk lore and fairy tales. They study the educational and romantic avenues to this heritage; her passion for the world of music through the Beauchamp family circle, her study of the cello, intense relations with the musical Trowell family, her "long[ing] for German" at Queen's College in London, because taught by the charismatic Walter Rippmann, and her crucially important seven-month stay in 1909 in the Bavarian spa town of Wörishofen, where she wrote the satires of In a German Pension. Mansfield's start as a professional writer is considered through biographical, psychoanalytical, and literary-critical readings: these include her literary responses to Bavarian culture, her fraught personal circumstances, her antipodean modernist practice of transposing New Zealand perspectives onto the "Germanic" narrative space, her use of Sekundenstil, her satire of Bavarian patriarchal attitudes, and her adaptations of Märchen. There are historical readings of Wörishofen and Rotorua as spa towns renowned for alternative health cures, of Mansfield's publications in the New Age in 1910 in light of debates about women's emancipation and accelerating Anglo-German tensions prior to World War One, while her German legacy is approached through a study of translations of her stories made under Nazi socialism and the German Democratic Republic.
In examining the enduring impact of German literature, philosophy, and music on Mansfield's artistic and intellectual development, this volume expands knowledge of the diversity of the continental landscapes that shaped her world view.
Katherine Mansfield and Germany will be of principal interest to Katherine Mansfield scholars. It will also attract a broader readership, primarily of academics, especially scholars working in modernist studies, and graduate students interested in trans-national modernism, and crossovers between German and English literary, musical, and historical studies. This includes members of the public in Germany and elsewhere with an interest in Mansfield's contintental, specifically German associations and influences.
Katherine Mansfield and Germany focuses on an under-researched yet crucially important aspect of Mansfield’s life and art, her encounter with Germany and all things German: language, culture, society.
Introduction: Katherine Mansfield’s German encounters
Janet M. Wilson and Tracy Miao
Part One
Wellington to Wörishofen: Locations and intersections
1. A “long[ing] for German”: Katherine Mansfield’s German encounters
Natalie Perman
2. From Rotorua toWörishofen: Katherine Mansfield’s spa experiences
John Horrocks
3. Mansfield in Wörishofen in 1909: literary encounters and explorations
Martin Griffiths
Part Two
In a German Pension: A “modernist” response to Germany
4. “On the grounds of this perversion”: Mansfield’s “fallen” figures
Eliana Rozinov
5. Constructing the modern woman: Katherine Mansfield’s In a German Pension stories
Janet M. Wilson
6. Katherine Mansfield and Sekundenstil
Michael Hollington
7. Antipodean modernism and the “Germanic” narrative space: Katherine Mansfield’s In a German Pension and Christina Stead’s The Salzburg Tales
Yingjie M. Cheng
Part Three
Music, poetry, and fairy tale: German cultural influences
8. “Strange medley of sound”: Resonances of Heine in the writings of Katherine Mansfield
Claire Davison
9. Katherine Mansfield’s Germany: “These pine trees provide most suitable accompaniment for a trombone!”
Delia da Sousa Correa
10. Turning white pebbles into bread crumbs: Katherine Mansfield’s fairytale collaging and morphing
Tracy Miao
11. “Where had she come from?” The fairy-tale and biblical undertones in Katherine Mansfield’s “A Cup of Tea”
Janka Kascakova
Part Four: Reframing literary history and Mansfield’s reception
12. “A thousand premeditated invasions”: Katherine Mansfield, Germany, and the New Age
Jenny McDonnell
13. Katherine Mansfield’s German reception in Nazi Germany and the former German Democratic Republic
Monika Sobotta
Produktdetaljer
Om bidragsyterne
Janet M. Wilson is professor emeritus of English and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Northampton, UK. Her research focuses on the diaspora and postcolonial writing of the settler colonies of Australasia, as well as refugee writing, the global novel, transnationalism, and transculturalism. From 2010-2020 she was Vice-Chair of the Katherine Mansfield Society. Her most recent publications are “‘Being at sea’: Sea Journeys in ‘The Stranger,’ ‘The Voyage,’ and ‘Six Years After’”, in Selected Stories of Katherine Mansfield: A Manuscript Critical Edition, edited by Todd Martin (2023), and “Broadcasting the Stories of Katherine Mansfield: The BBC Written Archive Centre”, in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modernist Archives, edited by Jamie Callison et al (2024).
Tracy Miao is Associate Professor at Xi’an International Studies University in China. She was the winner of Katherine Mansfield Society’s 2020 Essay Prize, and the winning essay “Casting a ‘haunting light’: Katherine Mansfield’s Modernist Vision of Childhood” was published in Katherine Mansfield Studies Vol.13 (2021). Her publications include “Katherine Mansfield and the East” in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Katherine Mansfield (2020), and “Waves and ‘moment[s] of suspension’: Katherine Mansfield’s Painterly and Kinetic Language in Fiction” in Katherine Mansfield: International Approaches (2022).