Katherine Mansfield and the (Post)colonial

This volume addresses issues raised by Katherine Mansfield’s nomadic rootlessness as an ‘extraterritorial’ writer. Contributions draw on postcolonial and diasporic frameworks to examine Mansfield’s insights into colony and empire.

In seeking new possibilities for alignments with, and resolutions to, the contradictory agendas implied by the terms "(post)colonial" and "modernist", the essays in this volume address the clashing perspectives between Mansfield''s life in Europe, where her troubled self-designation as the "little colonial" became a fertile source of her distinctive brand of literary modernism, and her ongoing, complex relationship with her New Zealand homeland. The contributors investigate Mansfield''s (post)colonial modernism in the context both of New Zealand settler-colonial fiction and of her European literary inheritance. Affinities with writers such as Edith Wharton and Robert Louis Stevenson reveal that "home" can be a diasporic place, combining alienation with belonging. The volume also registers initial responses to the widened scope for Mansfield scholarship launched by the first two volumes of the new Edinburgh Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield.