Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture by Chris Mourant

Abstract

MLR, .,   carefully curated experience. Denisoff’s book is driven by the contention that while ‘[Machen’s] pieces circulated in the gyre of British Decadent culture’, his was an ‘innovative form of Decadence’ rooted in Machen’s fascination with pagan spirituality (dating back to his childhood in rural Wales) and unique exposure to occult literature (p. ). e plentiful annotations painstakingly guide the reader through the range of Machen’s (literary) reference, showing how the idiosyncrasies of his experience find expression in the Decadent aesthetics of his writing. is apparatus is usefully reinforced by a ‘Decadent Chronology of Machen’s Life’, selections from the non-fiction, and a critical contexts section—materials which illuminate Denisoff’s claims and make the volume a valuable teaching edition. Among the fiction, the volume contains tales (such as ‘e Lost Club’) which reveal the influence of Wilde and Stevenson, and at its core are the two novellas—e Great God Pan () and the Hill of Dreams ()—both produced, as Denisoff explains, ‘during his most Decadent period of writing’ (p. ). Interestingly, though, Denisoff accommodates both the  story ‘e Bowmen’ (a work of fabulation based around the battle of Mons) and ‘Ritual’ (a  tale about a tribal ritual enacted in a contemporary London suburb) within the remit of his volume. In doing so, Denisoff sensitively describes an engagement with Decadence which (through a series of disavowals and abiding preoccupations) survives beyond its high cultural moment in the s. It is this inclination to open up the parameters of Decadence, along with its success in adding considerable depth to our understanding of a popularly neglected fin-de-siècle writer, that locates Decadent and Occult Works squarely within Kaye’s definition of the ‘third wave’. T U J F Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture. By C M. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. . x+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. Katherine Mansfield spent her entire career, first and foremost, as a writer for periodicals. Book publications came second, and were, almost without exception, comprised of previously published periodical material. It is fitting, therefore, that she be considered as a ‘magazine modernist’ (p. ), and surprising that Chris Mourant’s Katherine Mansfield and Periodical Culture is the first to take up her development as a writer with a detailed focus on how she navigated the networks of production and exploited the particularities of the periodical medium. Within this context, Mourant is also concerned with issues of gender and national identity. e monograph therefore provides a complex consideration of Mansfield. We see her not simply as a magazine writer, but as a colonial woman magazine writer in a male-dominated literary field in the metropolitan heart of empire. e book is structured chronologically, with each chapter covering a specific periodical . e Introduction usefully and thoroughly situates the monograph within the relevant scholarly contexts, while also providing an overview of Mansfield’s New Zealand juvenilia. Chapter , focused on e New Age, offers productive reassessments of Mansfield’s feminist politics and aesthetics within broader national and  Reviews cultural contexts. Mourant undertakes a substantial consideration of Beatrice Hastings ’s writings for the journal as a comparative frame through which to consider what he identifies as Mansfield’s ‘renegade feminism’ (p. ), a radical individualist form that sat in opposition to the suffrage-inflected feminism. In the second chapter Mourant shows how Mansfield used the periodical space and networks of Rhythm magazine as a means to explore cultural difference through contributions that critique nationalist, colonial, and gendered perspectives. Chapter  covers Mansfield’s much-overlooked body of critical writings that defined the core of her work for the Athenaeum. Mourant argues that Mansfield used book reviewing to contribute to a broader ‘new word/new world’ discourse that was informing emerging theories of literary modernism. In a particularly rich section of this chapter, Mourant explores the affinities between Mansfield and Woolf and the dialogic nature of the development of their aesthetic ideas. A final short chapter considers her posthumous publications in the Adelphi, which served as a means for J. M. Murry to fashion an idealized image of her, one which smoothed over her...