Katherine Mansfield, Illness and Death

(Paperback)

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During Katherine Mansfield's life she experienced the effects of abortion, miscarriage, gonorrhoea, peritonitis, rheumatism and tuberculosis, and would take up a peripatetic existence constantly in search of more favourable climates. The First World War of 19141918 and the influenza pandemic of 191820 informed the zeitgeist of her times. This volume of essays explores the extent to which this resonant context of disease and death shaped Mansfield's literary output and her modes of thinking. Illness both stimulated and limited Mansfield's creativity she would write to fund her medical care while simultaneously limited by her poor health, writing in 1922: 'The real point is I shall have to make as much money as I can on my next book my path is so dotted with doctors'. As explored in this volume, her personal writings document the increasing influence of tubercular literary predecessors such as Anton Chekhov and John Keats, while her stories function compellingly as dialogue with loved ones who have been lost her brother, her mother, her grandmother endowing them with life in the process.

Author Bio

Aime Gasston is author of Modernist Short Fiction and Things (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021) and co-editor, with Gerri Kimber and Janet Wilson, of Katherine Mansfield: New Directions (Bloomsbury, 2020).

Gerri Kimber is a Visiting Professor in the Department of English at the University of Northampton and is co-editor of the annual yearbook Katherine Mansfield Studies. She is the deviser and series editor of the four-volume Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield (2016) and the author of Katherine Mansfield: The View from France and A Literary Modernist: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story.

A Professor of English at Huntington University, Todd Martin's primary areas of interest are twentieth century British and American literature. He has published articles on such varied authors as John Barth, E. E. Cummings, Clyde Edgerton, Julia Alvarez, Edwidge Danticat, Sherwood Anderson and Katherine Mansfield. He is the editor of the forthcoming Katherine Mansfield and the Bloomsbury Group.