“Mais vous savez, c'est un peu degoutant, ça”: Katherine Mansfield, Food, and the Indiscretions of the Great War

Abstract

The short fiction of modernist author Katherine Mansfield, in particular her work written during World War I, provides a distinctive glimpse into the civilian culture of war. Mansfield uses food imagery in her writing to accentuate a shifting sensibility and profoundly emotional response to her own experience of the war. Embedded throughout her letters, notebooks, and short fiction written during and soon after the Great War, are references to food, especially to meat. Mansfield's food imagery and her artistic manipulation of the act of consuming food politicizes her work and compels a reconsideration of several pieces of short fiction which engage the event of war.