Academics Affirm Influence of Katherine Mansfield

Two UK academics from Edge Hill University in Lancashire have taken over editorship of the respected Tinakori: Katherine Mansfield Society Critical Journal, and are hoping to draw further attention to Mansfield’s often overlooked importance to the Modernist movement.

Senior lecturers in English Literature Dr Kym Brindle and Dr Karen D’Souza have been given the joint role in recognition of their own work on Mansfield, who is one of New Zealand’s literature icons.

Brindle said: “Mansfield contributed to a mood of reinvention for literature to create a new, avant-garde writing style. She was a free thinker who constantly challenged the status quo. Although she died young, just 32, she made a lasting impact on the modernist movement.”

The first edition of the journal contains six critical articles on topics including The City, Settler Colonialism, and the Domestic Gothic Uncanny. Also featured is an interview with Professor Kirsty Gunn, who is an internationally published and well-known fiction writer and recipient of the 2015 Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Gunn is also Patron of the Katherine Mansfield Society.

Original article by Niall Hood, FE News, October 23, 2020.