Katherine Mansfield Studies Vol. 10

The Peer-Reviewed Yearbook of the Katherine Mansfield Society.
Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf.

CALL FOR PAPERS

My God I love to think of you, Virginia, as my friend … pray consider how rare it is to find some one with the same passion for writing that you have, who desires to be scrupulously truthful with you – and to give you the freedom of the city without any reserves at all. 

-Katherine Mansfield, Collected Letters (vol. 1, p. 131, 24 June 1917)

Mansfield’s ardent overture to Woolf launched a historic relationship of mutual admiration and fascination shot through with misunderstanding, wariness, rivalry, and envy. Now ‘curious & thrilling’ (KM, CL1, 327), warm, absorbing, intimate; now distant and secretly critical; always competitive and often foundering in ‘quicksands’ (VW, D1, 243), this brief friendship had a profound and enduring impact on both writers’ imaginations and creative experiments. For volume 10 of Katherine Mansfield Studies, we invite comparative essays that explore aspects of the manifold relationship between these writers and their works, from their early meetings to the simultaneous launch of Prelude and the Hogarth Press through Mansfield’s early death and Woolf’s reflections on reading Mansfield’s published and posthumous oeuvre.

Some possible (not exclusive) comparative topics include:

  • Early Lives, Education, Influences
  • Travel Writings
  • City, Women, a Writer’s Freedom
  • Street Walking, Haunting, Flânerie
  • Empire, Metropole, Colony
  • Prelude and the Hogarth Press
  • Publishing Modernism
  • Families, Social Milieux
  • Sexualities, Loves, Marriages
  • Making Short Stories Modern
  • Letters, Diaries, Journals, Notebooks
  • Places, Spaces, Houses, Gardens
  • Thinking Sideways through our Sisters
  • Bloomsbury and the Murrys
  • Manuscripts and Archives
  • Publication and Reception History
  • KM/VW as Readers and/or Reviewers
  • VW & KM’s Posthumous Writings
  • KM and VW and/in Translation
  • Mutual Friends, Acquaintances, Influences
  • Visual Art and Aesthetics: Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism
  • KM, VW and the Arts of Life: Material and Domestic Economies
  • The Art of Appearing: Style, Costume, Mask, Pose, Look, Gaze
  • Visual Archives: Snapshots, Portraits
  • Writing and Illness
  • Still Lifes: The Art of Describing
  • Life Drawing: Portraiture, Self-Portraiture
  • Representing WWI: Experience, Perspective, Genre, Form, Voice
  • Genre: Boundaries & Crossings: Fiction, Poetry, Essays, Life Writing

Please email submissions of 5000-6000 words, including endnotes, formatted in Word and in MHRA style*, 12 pt, Times New Roman, with an abstract and 50-word biography, to the guest editor, Professor Christine Froula, at kms@katherinemansfieldsociety.org 

*MHRA Style Guide, available on the Katherine Mansfield Society website: http:www.katherinemansfieldsociety.org/yearbook-katherine-mansfield-studies/

Creative Writing

We welcome creative submissions – poetry, short stories, creative essays, one-act play scripts – on Mansfield and Woolf. Please submit them, accompanied by a brief (50 words) biography, to kms@katherinemansfieldsociety.org.

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: 31 AUGUST 2017