338 Result(s)
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Literature
British and Irish Literature
Fiction
Literary History
Twentieth-Century Literature
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Conclusion: New Kids on the Virginia Woolf Block
A Poetics of Postmodernism and Neomodernism: Rewriting Mrs Dalloway has examined how the ‘kids on the Virginia Woolf block’1 have employed the ‘mythical method’,2 borrowed and appropriated Woolf’s legacy, and mad...
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Introduction: ‘Born into a Large Connection’
In A Sketch of the Past, towards the end of her life, Virginia Woolf was again considering her forebears and memorialising her past. She was wondering, ‘Who was I then? Adeline Virginia Stephen, the second daught...
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Introduction
The detail of Katherine Mansfield’s passport on the cover of this volume is a fitting illustration of how — although it was for London and England that she set out on her journey from her New Zealand home in 1...
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“Pale Whore, Pale Writer”: Is There Punishment for the Crime?
What appears to be one of the more essential problems with Dostoyevsky’s poetics in Crime and Punishment deals, simply, with his occasional lapse into often using the wrong word at the wrong time. Beyond the mys...
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Portrayal of Children
It is for her depiction of children that Mansfield is particularly renowned. Children are of paramount importance in every story in which they appear — and they appear very frequently — in ‘Prelude’, ‘At the B...
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Conclusion
I will conclude with a brief overview of the new work that appeared during the period of the genre’s construction, from the Sword and Sorcery vogue of the early 1960s through about 1980, the point at which the...
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Mansfield as Innovator of the Modernist Short Story
Like painting in watercolours, short story writing may seem a deceptively easy task for those who have not attempted it, and this goes part way to explain the dismissive tone taken by so many critics towards t...
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Conclusion
Forty years from when we began, we have reached the end of the writing lives of Buchan, Yates and Thirkell. As I described in the Introduction, Buchan’s literary reputation flourished after his death, and has ...
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Sun, Moon and Sea Imagery
At the very end of ‘The Daughters of the Late Colonel’, Constantia, one of the middle-aged spinster protagonists reflects:
She remembered the times she had come in here, crept out of bed in her nigh...
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Dramatic Techniques
One of the most significant and most noticeably dramatic of Mansfield’s techniques is the use of the ‘nouvelle-in-stant’ — or ‘slices of life’, where the action occupies merely a brief instant of time. For Ren...
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Coda: “Images of Voice” and the Art of the Sublime
Through a reading relating Whitman’s “As I Ebb’d with the Ocean of Life,” Shelley’s poem “The Triumph of Life,” and a passage of Woolf’s Between the Acts, O’Hara crystalizes his view of revisionism, suggesting th...
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Ugly Hairy Mounds, Fierce Hairy Armpits, and Sewer-Like Menstruations: Women as Vulgar Commodity in Fuentes’s The Old Gringo
One of the key responsibilities in criticism is not to ignore the seemingly machismo attitude Fuentes has towards women. In The Old Gringo machismo is not only apparent but vulgar and abhorrent. What is replete ...
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Mansfield in Detail
In 2012, for the first time, a fully annotated two-volume collection of all of Mansfield’s extant fiction writing was published.2 Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of this edition is that it permits us to see — ...
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Use of Literary Impressionism
This quotation highlights Mansfield’s appreciation of post-impressionist art. She would go on to transpose this impressionistic technique onto her own literary endeavours. The term ‘literary impressionism’ was...
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Gazing from the Inside: Lacan and an Endocrinological Notion of the Male “Gaze”
Needless to say, the influence of psychology on literary theory has, over the decades, been significant. Whether one has been influenced by depth psychology, the trend of the past, or critical theory and psych...
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‘There is always the other side, always’: Katherine Mansfield’s and Jean Rhys’s Travellers in Europe
The quotation in the title is taken from Jean Rhys’s best-known novel Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), but I want to apply it to her much earlier novel set in Paris, Good Morning, Midnight (1939). My comparison of the n...
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Sexuality as a Theme
Mansfield talked openly about sexual issues in her notebooks and letters from an early age, though much of what she wrote on these subjects remained unprinted during Murry’s lifetime. The following was written...
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Introduction
British popular and avant-garde literatures from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are often conceptualized as dichotomies, as mutually exclusive opposites. The trajectory of their taxonomies, ...
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Introduction
James Joyce’s influence on contemporary literature has been profound, yet remains surprisingly unexplored. Joycean Legacies is the first essay collection to examine Joyce’s complex influence biographically, textu...
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Conclusion: Modernist Melancholia and Its Afterlife
What is modernist melancholia and what are its legacies? In a famous passage from Conrad’s letter to his friend Cunninghame Graham from 14 January 1898 Conrad evokes the totality of the modern melancholic expe...
