Katherine Mansfield and Germany is the first study of Mansfield's
encounter with Germany and all things German: language, culture,
society. This crucial area of her life and art has been relatively
neglected, even though Germany held Mansfield in its thrall all her
life, as myriad associations found in her fiction, notebooks, and
letters confirm. Her immersion in the German language and culture was
formative, influencing her early poetry and experimental prose
writing, and as stories published in her first book In a German
Pension (1911) show, was an important foundation for her cosmopolitan,
(post)colonial modernism. The 13 essays here offer insights onto the
German intellectual and artistic heritages of the early 20th century
that influenced Mansfield: Nietzsche in philosophy, the music of
Wagner, the German Minnesänger and poetry, Heine's lyric verse, and
German folk lore and fairy tales. They study the educational and
romantic avenues to this heritage; her passion for the world of music
through the Beauchamp family circle, her study of the cello, intense
relations with the musical Trowell family, her "long[ing] for German"
at Queen's College in London, because taught by the charismatic Walter
Rippmann, and her crucially important seven-month stay in 1909 in the
Bavarian spa town of Wörishofen, where she wrote the satires of In a
German Pension. Mansfield's start as a professional writer is
considered through biographical, psychoanalytical, and
literary-critical readings: these include her literary responses to
Bavarian culture, her fraught personal circumstances, her antipodean
modernist practice of transposing New Zealand perspectives onto the
"Germanic" narrative space, her use of Sekundenstil, her satire of
Bavarian patriarchal attitudes, and her adaptations of Märchen. There
are historical readings of Wörishofen and Rotorua as spa towns
renowned for alternative health cures, of Mansfield's publications in
the New Age in 1910 in light of debates about women's emancipation and
accelerating Anglo-German tensions prior to World War One, while her
German legacy is approached through a study of translations of her
stories made under Nazi socialism and the German Democratic Republic.
In examining the enduring impact of German literature, philosophy, and
music on Mansfield's artistic and intellectual development, this
volume expands knowledge of the diversity of the continental
landscapes that shaped her world view. Katherine Mansfield and Germany
will be of principal interest to Katherine Mansfield scholars. It will
also attract a broader readership, primarily of academics, especially
scholars working in modernist studies, and graduate students
interested in trans-national modernism, and crossovers between German
and English literary, musical, and historical studies. This includes
members of the public in Germany and elsewhere with an interest in
Mansfield's contintental, specifically German associations and
influences.
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Influences, Interactions, Afterlives
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781040340011
Publisert
2025
Utgave
1. utgave
Utgiver
Taylor & Francis
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter