The Bloomsbury Handbook to Katherine Mansfield

Review

The Bloomsbury Handbook to Katherine Mansfield is an outstanding contribution to Katherine Mansfield studies. It is exceptionally well- structured by its editor, Todd Martin, whose introduction to the book is in itself a comprehensive and essential historical examination of the critical reception of Mansfield's work during the latter part of the twentieth century. It provides readers with an essential grounding to help them contextualize the new critical approaches taken by the twelve notable Mansfield scholars who have written the insightful, often intriguing, essays which make up the Handbook.

This awesomely comprehensive and research-rich handbook to Katherine Mansfield will be a go-to resource for readers for a generation and more to come, ranging from the long-term specialist to the newly hooked browser. Everything about her work is here, both the mainstream and the quirky-its musical interests and intertexts; its global, western and southern settings; its New Zealand yearnings; and her important shaping influence on the convulsion of new media, thought and forms that was modernism. Perhaps, most of all, the reader will find here wide-ranging reflections on the immense power of the short story in her ingenious hands.

Product Description

Through her formally innovative and psychologically insightful short stories, Katherine Mansfield is increasingly recognised as one of the central figures in early 20th-century modernism. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars and covering her complete body of work, this is the most comprehensive volume to Mansfield scholarship available today.

The Bloomsbury Handbook to Katherine Mansfield covers the full range of contemporary scholarly themes and approaches to the author's work, including:

· New biographical insights, including into the early New Zealand years
· Responses to the historical crises: the Great War, empire and orientalism
· Mansfield's fiction, poetry, criticism and private writing
· Mansfield and modernist culture – from Bloomsbury to the little magazines
· Mansfield and her contemporaries – Woolf, Lawrence and von Arnim
· Mansfield and the arts – visual culture, cinema and music

The book also includes a substantial annotated bibliography of key works of Mansfield scholarship from the last 30 years.

About the Author

Todd Martin Todd Martin is Professor of English at Huntington University where he currently holds the Edwina Patton Chair of Arts and Sciences. He was recently awarded the Lester J. Cappon Fellowship in Documentary Editing at the Newberry Library in Chicago, IL. He is the Membership Secretary of the Katherine Mansfield Society and serves as co-editor of the Society's book series, Katherine Mansfield Studies. He has published on a wide variety of authors, including E. E. Cummings, Clyde Edgerton, Edwidge Danticat, Julia Alvarez, Sherwood Anderson, and Katherine Mansfield.

Jeff Keuss is Professor of Christian Ministry, Theology, and Culture at Seattle Pacific University, USA.