Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf: A Public of Two (Oxford World's Classics (Hardcover))

Book Description
Long after the death of Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923), Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) described being haunted by Mansfied in dreams. Through detailed comparative readings of their fiction, letters, and diaries, Angela Smith explores the intense affinity between the two writers. Writing at a time when the First World War and the changing attitudes towards empire problematized definitions of foreignness, the fiction of both Mansfield and Woolf is characterized by moments in which the perceiving consciousness sees the familiar made strange, the domestic made menacing.


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Long after Katherine Mansfield's death, Virginia Woolf described being haunted by her in dreams. The focus of Smith's book is the intense affinity this reveals between the writers. It is explored through their shared experience of being 'threshold people', familiar with the liminal, for each of them a zone both of transition and of habitation. Mansfield's and Woolf's fiction is characterized by moments of disorientating suspension in which the perceiving consciousness sees the familiar made strange, the domestic made menacing. Through detailed comparative readings, Smith shows that boundaries are also crossed or blurred in the form of the fiction. Woolf's and Mansfield's particular inflection of modernism is considered too in the context of cinematic form, and the aesthetics of post-impressionism.


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