Sarah Ailwood and Melinda Harvey, eds, Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 227 pp., L70, ISBN 9780748694419

Meghan Marie Hammond, Empathy and the Psychology of Literary Modernism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014), 216 pp., L70, ISBN 9780748690985

Janka Kaščáková and Gerri Kimber, eds, Katherine Mansfield and Continental Europe: Connections and Influences (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 282 pp., £55, ISBN 9781137429964

Gerri Kimber, Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 114 pp., £45, ISBN 9781137483874

Anna Plumridge, ed., The Urewera Notebook, by Katherine Mansfield (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 128 pp., £30, ISBN 9781474400152

Facing the dehumanisation caused by growing industrialisation and the existential crisis of the First World War, some authors began to question all but the most superficial human interactions. Others, like Sherwood Anderson, proffered relationships as the only means of not only staving off isolation but also restoring our humanity. In ‘Sophistication’, the penultimate story of Winesburg, Ohio, Anderson's protagonist, George Willard, momentarily connects emotionally with Helen White. The story concludes: ‘For some reason they could not have explained they had both got from their silent evening together the thing needed. Man or boy, woman or girl, they had for a moment taken hold of the thing that makes the mature life of men and women in the modern world possible.’ The coming together of individuals, distinct as they may be physically and emotionally, provides ‘the thing needed’ to exist more fully in the modern world.

While psychology has tended to emphasise one's relation to the self, it also explores the extent to which we are relational beings. But while some contend that we are mere physical beings who interact in a material world, others maintain that we have limited human agency which enables us to interpret our external realities. To us literary critics and theorists, these attempts to find patterns in the universe in order to understand how we fit into the world at large – whether we consider that meaning-seeking as spiritual or not – seem tantamount to what we value in literature and what it reveals about ourselves and the state of our world. And if we are more than mere material beings, the implications are profound for our understanding of relationships.