Katherine Mansfield and World War One

Examines Katherine Mansfield’s engagement with the First World War and its impact on her writings
This special issue of Katherine Mansfield Studies is in remembrance of the centenary of one of the most significant events of the modernist period. Like the reclamation of women’s war writings that we have already seen in relation to Virginia Woolf and others, Mansfield’s literary response to the key political event of her time is fundamental to our understanding of her developing writerly style. It is in her responses to the war that we find a ’political Mansfield’, and the articles in this volume provide us with a greater appreciation of Mansfield in her socio-historical context. In offering new readings of Mansfield’s explicit and implicit war stories, the contributions to this volume refine and extend our knowledge of particular stories and their genealogy. They illuminate the specific and more general influences of the war on Mansfield’s evolving technique and, jointly, they reveal the importance of the war on her literary language, as well as for her own particular brand of modernism. This volume helps develop our ideas of what constitute war writings and, in so doing, expands the scope of Mansfield scholarship and the field of First World War studies.

Gerri Kimber is Senior Lecturer in Modernism and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Northampton. She is Chair of the Katherine Mansfield Society and co-editor of Katherine Mansfield Studies. She is the author of Katherine Mansfield: The View from France (2008), and A Literary Modernist: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story (2008).

Delia da Sousa Correa is Senior Lecturer, English Department, Arts Faculty, The Open University.

W. Todd Martin is Professor of English at Huntington University, USA. He teaches twentieth-century British and American literature and has published on such various authors as John Barth, E. E. Cummings, Clyde Edgerton, Sherwood Anderson, Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat, and Katherine Mansfield. He is the Membership Secretary for the Katherine Mansfield Society and the Liason-Editor for Katherine Mansfield Studies.

Alice Kelly completed her PhD on women’s writings of the First World War at the University of Cambridge, having previously studied at the University of Sussex, Reed College in Portland, Oregon, and the University of Oxford. She is currently a Visiting Scholar at Yale University. She is co-editing a volume of essays entitled Shaping Modernism: Katherine Mansfield in Context.

Isobel Maddison is a Fellow of Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge, where she is a College Lecturer and the Director of Studies in English. She works primarily on female modernism and on the connections between modernism and popular fiction. She also has interests in women’s writings of the First World War. She has published on the work of Dorothy Richardson and Katherine Mansfield and is the author of Elizabeth von Arnim: Beyond the German Garden (Ashgate, 2013).