Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: ‘The Famous New Zealand Mag.-Story Writer’
- 1 The New Age: Gender, Nation and Empire
- 2 Rhythm: Parody and (Post)Colonial Modernism
- 3 The Athenaeum: ‘Wanted, a New Word’ (World)
- 4 The Adelphi: Katherine Mansfield’s Afterlives
- Conclusion
- Appendices
- Select Bibliography
- Index
3 - The Athenaeum: ‘Wanted, a New Word’ (World)
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 May 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: ‘The Famous New Zealand Mag.-Story Writer’
- 1 The New Age: Gender, Nation and Empire
- 2 Rhythm: Parody and (Post)Colonial Modernism
- 3 The Athenaeum: ‘Wanted, a New Word’ (World)
- 4 The Adelphi: Katherine Mansfield’s Afterlives
- Conclusion
- Appendices
- Select Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In June 1920, Katherine Mansfield set down her most developed exposition of what she understood by modern short fiction in a review for The Athenaeum titled ‘Wanted, a New Word’. Clare Hanson has described this as ‘virtually the only “manifesto” KM produced for the kind of fiction she herself wrote’. When Murry later collected this review in Novels and Novelists (1930), however, he erroneously gave it the title ‘Wanted, a New World’, which was then subsequently used in Hanson's edition of The Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield (1987) and in B. J. Kirkpatrick's A Bibliography of Katherine Mansfield (1989). This slippage not only calls attention to the mutability of Mansfield's writing as it passed through different textual transmissions, encouraging us to return to the original sites of publication in periodicals and magazines, but also suggests a direct correlation between her ideas of modernist formal experimentation and a geographical imaginary of discovery.
Indeed, after the death of her brother in October 1915, when Mansfield travelled to the south of France, she made a series of famous notebook entries linking her commitment to finding a new ‘form’ with making the ‘undiscovered country leap into the eyes of the old world’. The ‘form that I would choose has changed utterly’, she wrote, addressing her brother; ‘I feel no longer concerned with the same appearance of things’:
Oh, I want for one moment to make our undiscovered country leap into the eyes of the old world. It must be mysterious, as though floating – it must take the breath. It must be ‘one of those islands’ […] Then I want to write poetry. I feel always trembling on the brink of poetry. […] But especially I want to write a kind of long elegy to you – perhaps not in poetry. No, perhaps in Prose – almost certainly in a kind of special prose.
Mansfield instinctively reaches for a spatial vocabulary of empire when thinking about writing and language here, positioning herself as a New Zealander narrating the colonial nation (the ‘new world’) within the context of the European ‘old world’.
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- Information
- Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture , pp. 181 - 242Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2018