The Explosion of Mansfield Studies

Abstract

Surveying the number of recent publications with ‘Katherine Mansfield’ in their titles, it seems that Mansfield studies is currently undergoing the same explosion of critical attention and activity that has already happened to other female modernist writers: Virginia Woolf in the 1970s, Rebecca West in the 1980s, and H.D. in the late 1980s and early 1990s, to name but a few. Mansfield is clearly not an author being discovered for the first time – there is already an established critical canon by scholars including Vincent O'Sullivan and Margaret Scott, Sydney Janet Kaplan, Angela Smith, and others, as well as a number of biographies to date – but what Mansfield studies can perhaps claim as its own is the intense energy and speed with which the critical discipline is currently expanding, led by a group of committed enthusiasts focused under the auspices of the recently formed Katherine Mansfield Society. As the editors of Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism point out, the ‘resurgence of interest in Mansfield’ and ‘renewed scholarly activity’ (pp. iii–ix) include four conferences and colloquia focused solely on Mansfield (London 2008, Menton 2009, Melbourne 2010, and Cambridge 2011, with a further conference planned in Slovakia for 2012); a new dedicated author-based scholarly journal, Katherine Mansfield Studies, published by Edinburgh University Press; and the inauguration of various regular events, including an annual essay prize and birthday lecture.