338 Result(s)
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British and Irish Literature
Fiction
Literary History
Twentieth-Century Literature
Chapter
Literature
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Chapter
Afterword
Between July and November of 2014 volunteers gradually covered the moat around the Tower of London in 888,246 ceramic red poppies, one for every British and British colonial life lost in the First World War. F...
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Like Giving Birth to a Dead White Star: An Introduction to the Modern Sublime in Virginia Woolf
By way of a close reading of “Moments of Being: ‘Slater’s Pins Have No Points’” O’Hara explicates his theory of the modernist sublime as it relates to Woolf. Through an act of identification and doubling that ...
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Afterword
I began this book with an account of the literary fraternity who gathered in and around Kent in the closing years of the nineteenth century. It was no doubt an exhilarating and inspirational time for all invol...
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The Uncanny Muse of Creative Reading: On the New Cambridge Edition of Mrs. Dalloway
O’Hara notes Woolf’s inclusive gesture offering readers the democratic play of readings: whatever edition used, they can use their novel’s key elements. Author, reader, and characters participate in reformativ...
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‘And Finally Virginia’: Cameron, Ritchie, Stephen and Woolf’s Constructs of her Ancestry
Woolf flamboyantly constructs her own ancestry: ‘Marie Antoinette loved my ancestor: hence he was exiled; hence the Pattles, the barrel that burst, and finally Virginia’ (L6: 461). She here traces a direct lin...
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Introduction
What precipitated the writing of these essays was a suggestion from one of my graduate students, who also suggested the name of the course: “Women in Love and Other Emotional States.” I had previously taught a...
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Relationships
Allied to the themes of sexuality and feminism is that of relationships. As Gillian Boddy points out, often in Mansfield’s works, ‘the worlds of male and female seem only tenuously linked. The men seem quite a...
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Introduction
Discussion of Mansfield’s writing technique in the early years after her death was initially subordinate to the overwhelming interest in her personality, with the hagiography of her life and praise for her per...
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The Revisionary Muse in Virginia Woolf’s On Being Ill: On Literary Politics, Modernist Style
In On Being Ill, Woolf figures sickness as a new perspective that grants priority to the immediacy of the body more than the mind, endowing language with a new physicality. O’Hara notes the materiality of the wor...
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“Blushes & Flushes”: Anna Karenina’s Shameful Physiology
Not unlike Dostoyevsky’s treatment of “paleness,” Tolstoy experiments with narrational blushing in a way untreated prior to Anna Karenina. Throughout the novel, Tolstoy’s characters either blush or flush at leas...
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Use of Humour
Humour is frequently present in Mansfield’s short stories (as it is in her personal writing and letters), yet this is one aspect of her writing continually glossed over by many of her critics. She displays in ...
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Mansfield’s Narrative Technique
In November 1920, with a little over two years left to live, Mansfield wrote to Murry:
What a QUEER business writing is. I don’t know. I don’t believe other people are ever as foolishly excited as I...
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War and Death
In 1919, Mansfield, criticising writers whose work she considered remained unchanged by the Great War, wrote to Murry:
And yet I feel one can lay down no rules; It’s not in the least a question of m...
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Katherine Mansfield and Stanisław Wyspiański — Meeting Points
The poem ‘To Stanisław Wyspiański’ from which the above fragment has been extracted, is so well known to all Katherine Mansfield scholars that it almost requires no introduction. Mansfield’s discovery of Stani...
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The Epiphanic Moment
Allied to the idea of the ‘nouvelle-instant’ is Mansfield’s use of Joycean ‘epiphanies’,1 or to use her own words, the ‘blazing moment’:
If we are not to look for facts and events in a novel — and w...
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The Incorporation of Symbolism
In my book Katherine Mansfield: The View from France, I consider to what extent Mansfield’s writing was influenced by the Symbolist and the Decadent movements in France.1 Hanson and Gurr also point out that ‘[in]...
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Feminist Issues
Discussing Mansfield’s feminism, Wheeler declares:
Her analyses are not simplistic; she does not portray women as victims and men as perpetrators or victors. Rather, women are shown to be as much en...
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Coda: The Postcultural City and the Postculturalist Left
In 2006 Lawrence Grossberg, the figure who played the most significant role in introducing the work of Stuart Hall and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies to the USA, published an essay ent...
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Introduction
The year 1895 marked a watershed moment for late-Victorian literature and culture. Events such as the trial and incarceration of Oscar Wilde and the publication in English translation of Max Nordau’s controver...
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‘Strange flower, half opened’: Katherine Mansfield and the Flowering of ‘the Self’
In 1957, Elizabeth Bowen referred to Katherine Mansfield as ‘our missing contemporary’,1 and, with the notable exception of a few pioneering studies focused on her work, Mansfield has remained a relatively under-...
