Mansfield Mobilised: Katherine Mansfield, the Great War and Military Discourse

Abstract

This article examines the military discourse that Katherine Mansfield appropriated in her letters, focusing on three particular letter clusters from 1915, 1918, and 1919. I argue that the First World War and its accompanying rhetoric provided an important stimulus for Mansfield's writing and later functioned as a counter-trope for her own personally more serious battle with illness. Both Mansfield's deliberate and unintentional incorporation of military discourse in her correspondence resulted in a hybridized figurative language – an example of what Allyson Booth has called elsewhere ‘civilian modernism’ – which was significant for Mansfield's later literary development, and more broadly for our understanding of literary modernism.