Katherine Mansfield: Inspirations and Influences

Katherine Mansfield: Inspirations and Influences Jagiellonian University, Krakow, Poland 5–7 July 2019

An international conference organised by the Katherine Mansfield Society Hosted by the Institute of English Studies, Jagiellonian University, Krakow Supported by Catholic University in Ružomberok, Slovakia Trnava University, Slovakia The New Zealand Embassy, Warsaw and the University of Northampton, UK

KEYNOTE SPEAKER

Professor Kirsty Gunn University of Dundee, UK

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS

This international conference celebrates the diversity of influences which inspired acclaimed New Zealand modernist short story writer, Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923). From her upbringing in Wellington, New Zealand, her schooling in London, and her return to Europe at the age of nineteen to begin her career as a writer, Mansfield’s short life was inevitably influenced by the people she met, the many places she visited or lived in, paintings she saw, music she played or listened to, trends in literature and the books she read, and the burgeoning film industry which she experienced both as an actor and an eager spectator. For example, the French Decadent and Symbolist movements would both have a lasting influence on Mansfield’s fiction. Indeed, echoes of, for example, the French symbolists, Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde and the Decadents are to be found in much of her prose writing. As Sydney Janet Kaplan argues,

Pater and Symons provided techniques that Mansfield would use later to uncover, at its deepest level, the culturally determined condition of women. By importing symbolist devices into realistic fiction, Mansfield exemplifies how the malebonded nineteenth-century aesthetes became absorbed into the twentieth-century feminist consciousness.

Most modern critics agree that Mansfield’s own unique form of Modernism was not so much derivative of other contemporary writers but was rather a product of her symbiosis of late-nineteenth-century techniques and themes, as outlined above, for the most part introduced through her reading of Symons when her tastes and preferences started to take shape and she began, with the Symbolists and the Decadents as her dominant influences, to write the sort of fiction which was committed to the possibilities of narrative experimentation.

 

In the years following her death, Mansfield herself would become an inspiration for – and influence on – other writers, including Elizabeth Bowen, Dame Jacqueline Wilson, as well as the Patron of the Katherine Mansfield Society, author Professor Kirsty Gunn. Indeed, one of Mansfield’s early biographers, Ian Gordon, writes, ‘She had the same kind of direct influence on the art of the short story as Joyce had on the novel. After Joyce and Katherine Mansfield neither the novel nor the short story can ever be quite the same again’.

Suggested topics for papers might include (but are not limited to):

• KM and New Zealand • KM and Russia • KM and France • KM and Poland • KM and Bavaria • KM and Switzerland  KM and Symbolism • KM and the fin-de-siècle • KM and A. R. Orage • KM and her contemporaries • KM and World War 1 • KM and modernity/the modern • KM and her literary legacy • KM and music • KM and film • KM and fine arts

Abstracts of 200 words, together with a bio-sketch, should be sent to the conference organisers: Dr Janka Kascakova, Catholic University in Ružomberok, Slovakia Dr Gerri Kimber, University of Northampton, UK Dr Władysław Witalisz, Institute of English Studies, Jagiellonian University, Krakow at kms@katherinemansfieldsociety.org.

Submission deadline: 1 February 2019.

Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story Bandol, France, 10-12 June 2016

Conference organised by the Katherine Mansfield Society Hosted by the town of Bandol, France Supported by the New Zealand Embassy, Paris and the University of Northampton, UK

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS Professor Enda Duffy University of California, Santa Barbara, USA Professor Ailsa Cox Edge Hill University, UK

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS This international conference celebrates the centenary of Katherine Mansfield’s visit to Bandol, where ‘The Aloe’ (the first draft of ‘Prelude’), was completed, Jan-March 1916. The genesis of this story bears witness to Mansfield’s development as a modernist writer, with her everyday subject matter and privileging of modernity, her focus on small, seemingly insignificant details at the expense of comprehensive description, her preference for the vignette which provides the reader with only fleeting glimpses of people and places, and her preoccupation with colour and her emphasis on surfaces and reflections. Her employment of multiple, shifting perspectives which are both subjective and fractured also displays an affinity with Impressionism, as does the attention she pays to the ephemeral effects of artificial and natural light, weather effects, and seasonal changes. 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 the genre.

H. E. Bates was an early-twentieth-century critic who understood this difficulty: ‘[t]he short story is the most difficult and exacting of all prose forms; it must not be allowed to foster the illusion […] that its very brevity makes it easy to do’. Clare Hanson makes the claim that the short story has often been the ‘chosen form of the exile […] who longs to return to a home country which is denied him/her’, Mansfield’s work being an obvious example of this tenet. Even today, the short story is perceived to be a lesser genre, contributing to the view held by some critics of Mansfield as a minor writer. Yet, the development of her own particular free indirect discourse form of writing, linking it to literary impressionism, culminated in her position as one of the most important early exponents of the modernist short story. Her techniques include the use of symbolism and humour; themes incorporate violence, war, death, childbirth, relationships – especially in marriage – together with feminist and sexual issues. Suggested topics for papers might include:

• The modernist short story • KM as practitioner of the short story genre • KM’s development as a short story writer • KM in the South of France • KM as commentator on the short story • KM and her legacy to the short story form • Literary influences on KM as a short story writer • Artistic and musical influences on KM as a short story writer • KM, the short story and the marketplace • Reception of KM as a short story writer

Abstracts of 200 words, together with a short bio-sketch, should be sent to the conference organisers: Dr Gerri Kimber, University of Northampton, UK Professor Janet Wilson, University of Northampton, UK at kms@katherinemansfieldsociety.org Submission deadline: 31 March 2016.

Katherine Mansfield and France

Katherine Mansfield
and France

International conference organised by the Université Paris III
—Sorbonne Nouvelle (EA 4398 PRISMES)
in conjunction with the Katherine Mansfield Society

19–21 June 2014

Guest speakers will be:
C. K. Stead, Sydney Janet Kaplan and Gerri Kimber

2014 seems the ideal year to celebrate Katherine Mansfield’s lifelong attachment to France and her passionate involvement with all things French: not just the language, literature and the arts, but the everyday world too, from recipes and customs to the contemporary socio-political context, transport, economics and of course the devastating impact of the war. France for Mansfield was a land of transit, a haven to escape to and a place of exile; it was an adopted home and a sad reminder of how far away those she loved were; life the other side of the Channel was sometimes a source of wonder and inspiration, at others the trigger for comic irony and bitter satire.

Mansfield’s biographers have minutely charted out her constant channel crossings in the years 1914–1923. Her letters, notebooks and stories all point to the different repercussions of France and French culture on her vivid imagination. Recent critical studies have explored both the story of Mansfield’s reception in France and the various influences French arts had on her own creative output. But the time now seems ripe to bring together scholars, researchers and students to try and piece together an overall picture of Mansfield in France and ‘une Mansfield française’.

Suggested topics for papers might include:

 Mansfield and French arts and literature: her reception in France; Mansfield as reader, critic and reviewer of French arts in Great Britain; her influence on contemporary and later French authors; translations and the publication history of her works in French.

 The French influence on Mansfield: French language and culture in her education and apprenticeship years; France as a setting for her stories; French life recorded in the journals in early story sketches; her readings of key French authors and their influence on her works; French aestheticism, fin-de-siècle and early-twentieth-century philosophy.

 Mansfield and French life and society: as journalist and eye-witness of war-torn France; a satirist of local habits and customs; a bemused observer of expatriate and émigré life; Paris and the French Riviera as the specific locations that have become so much associated with her work, but also French geographies of displacement, both real and affective.

 Mansfield, the polyglot, cultural ambassador and cosmopolitan: France as a step outside Englishness; forms of cultural otherness, alienation and renewal through the meeting and mixing of identities; language as empowerment and disempowerment; nationalism versus the political repercussions of border crossing; bilingualism; redefining the self as other; Mansfield the European.

 Mansfield and Frenchness as a means of thinking between: cross-dressing, roleplay, borrowed identities, impersonation; travesty, but also Frenchness itself seen from within and without, from the privileged outsider’s point of view, the ‘devenir français’ from Mansfield’s perspective.

Biographical, linguistic, literary, sociological, political comparative . . . all approaches are welcome in this endeavour to embrace Katherine Mansfield’s French life. Our exploration of the various French avenues in her life, works and afterlife will take place in the heart of Paris, and time out will be programmed into the conference to enable all those who attend to obtain a very literal sense of place and setting. Possible Mansfield-inspired walks within Paris itself and additional excursions to the immediate environs will be suggested later.

The three-day conference will also include an alternative, intercultural approach to Mansfield’s French life in the form of a cello recital given by London-based cellist Joseph Spooner and New Zealand pianist Kathryn Mosley with a programme of early twentieth century French music and works by Arnold Trowell.

 

Please submit abstracts of 250 words plus a bio-sketch of 50 words to the conference organisers kminparis@gmail.com
Deadline for abstracts: December 31st 2013
Organisers:
Claire Davison, Caroline Pollentier, Anne Mounic, Anne Besnault-Levita