Katherine
Mansfield and World War One
This volume invites essay
contributions which position Mansfield’s writing in relation to the First World
War. Vincent O’Sullivan has asserted that, ‘[f]rom any perspective, the most
important public event in Mansfield’s lifetime was the First World War’. By
1918, there were few families in Britain and many of its colonies whose lives
had not been directly affected by the conflict. The war was represented, both
during and after the event, as Armageddon, as a flood, as the death of a
generation. Mansfield was part of that generation and lost her brother in the
conflict. In 1915 she travelled, illegally, to the war zone near the Belgian
border. Later she witnessed the after-effects of gas poisoning as the injured
were brought in their thousands through the stations of Paris. To write without
relation to the war was a ‘lie in the soul’ Mansfield declared, in her criticism
of Virginia Woolf's Night and Day (1919).
This volume will consider
Mansfield’s response to the war, directly or obliquely, both in her fiction and
her personal writing. Submissions are welcomed that position her in relation to
her contemporaries, in particular to other writers. Submissions that theorise
female war writing are also welcome.
Suggested topics might include,
but are not limited to:
- Mansfield’s ‘war stories’ and her
distinctive modes of writing about the war
- The war-torn generation:
depictions of grief and mourning; reactions to the deaths of Leslie Beauchamp
and others
- Political Mansfield and the
position of the female war writer
- The war and words: formal or
linguistic play; war rhetoric; register; tone; parody; satire
- Her contemporaries and war: how
does her literary response to war compare to others?
- The Carco affair and Mansfield’s
responses to wartime France
- Modernist and First World War
writing
ARTICLES
Submissions of between 5000–7000
words (inclusive of endnotes), should be emailed in Word format to the
Guest Editors for this volume:
Please also send:
·
a 50 word biography
·
a brief abstract (150
words) summarising your article
·
5 or 6
keywords
CREATIVE WRITING
Pieces of creative writing on the
general theme of Katherine Mansfield – poetry, short stories (no more than 3000
words), etc, should be sent to the editors, accompanied by a 50 word
biography:
BOOK REVIEWS
Book reviews of 500-600 words for
single books and 900-1200 words for two or more books should be sent to the
Reviews Editors, Dr Kathryn Simpson and Dr Melinda Harvey, accompanied by a 50
word biography: kms@katherinemansfieldsociety.org
DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: 31 October
2013
A detailed style guide is available from the
Katherine Mansfield Society website:
