Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture

Book excerpt: Explores Katherine Mansfield's engagement in the periodical culture of the early twentieth century This book considers Mansfield's ambivalent position as a colonial woman writer by examining her contributions to the political weekly The New Age, the avant-garde little magazine Rhythm and the literary journal The Athenaeum. Contextualising Mansfield's work against the editorial strategies and professional cultures of each periodical, the book deepens and complicates older critical assumptions about the trajectory of Mansfield's development as a writer. Key FeaturesProvides the first sustained scholarly examination of Mansfield's engagement with and relation to early twentieth-century periodical cultureForegrounds the original material contexts in which Mansfield produced the majority of her work, emphasising a dialogic or 'conversational' model for modernismInterrogates Mansfield's ambivalent self-positioning within English literary circles as a 'colonial-metropolitan modernist' and 'outsider'Integrates ideas of the recent 'transnational turn' across literary studies into the field of periodical scholarship