Katherine Mansfield and Germany Influences, Interactions, Afterlives

Introduction: Katherine Mansfield’s German encounters

            Janet M. Wilson and Tracy Miao

Part One

Wellington to Wörishofen: Locations and intersections

1.     A “long[ing] for German”: Katherine Mansfield’s German encounters

Natalie Perman  

2.     From Rotorua toWörishofen: Katherine Mansfield’s spa experiences

John Horrocks  

3.     Mansfield in Wörishofen in 1909: literary encounters and explorations

 Martin Griffiths  

Part Two

In a German Pension: A “modernist” response to Germany

4.     “On the grounds of this perversion”: Mansfield’s “fallen” figures 

Eliana Rozinov

5.     Constructing the modern woman: Katherine Mansfield’s In a German Pension stories

Janet M. Wilson

6.     Katherine Mansfield and Sekundenstil

Michael Hollington

7.     Antipodean modernism and the “Germanic” narrative space: Katherine Mansfield’s In a German Pension and Christina Stead’s The Salzburg Tales 

Yingjie M. Cheng  

Part Three

 Music, poetry, and fairy tale: German cultural influences

8.     “Strange medley of sound”: Resonances of Heine in the writings of Katherine Mansfield

             Claire Davison  

9.     Katherine Mansfield’s Germany: “These pine trees provide most suitable accompaniment for a trombone!”

Delia da Sousa Correa

10.  Turning white pebbles into bread crumbs: Katherine Mansfield’s fairytale collaging and morphing

Tracy Miao  

11.  “Where had she come from?” The fairy-tale and biblical undertones in Katherine Mansfield’s “A Cup of Tea” 

Janka Kascakova

Part Four: Reframing literary history and Mansfield’s reception

12.  “A thousand premeditated invasions”: Katherine Mansfield, Germany, and the New Age

Jenny McDonnell

13.  Katherine Mansfield’s German reception in Nazi Germany and the former German Democratic Republic

 Monika Sobotta   

Biography

Janet M. Wilson is professor emeritus of English and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Northampton, UK. Her research focuses on the diaspora and postcolonial writing of the settler colonies of Australasia, as well as refugee writing, the global novel, transnationalism, and transculturalism. From 2010-2020 she was Vice-Chair of the Katherine Mansfield Society. Her most recent publications are “‘Being at sea’: Sea Journeys in ‘The Stranger,’ ‘The Voyage,’ and ‘Six Years After’”, in Selected Stories of Katherine Mansfield: A Manuscript Critical Edition, edited by Todd Martin (2023), and “Broadcasting the Stories of Katherine Mansfield: The BBC Written Archive Centre”, in The Bloomsbury Handbook of Modernist Archives, edited by Jamie Callison et al (2024).

Tracy Miao is Associate Professor at Xi’an International Studies University in China. She was the winner of Katherine Mansfield Society’s 2020 Essay Prize, and the winning essay “Casting a ‘haunting light’: Katherine Mansfield’s Modernist Vision of Childhood” was published in Katherine Mansfield Studies Vol.13 (2021). Her publications include “Katherine Mansfield and the East” in The Bloomsbury Handbook to Katherine Mansfield (2020), and “Waves and ‘moment[s] of suspension’: Katherine Mansfield’s Painterly and Kinetic Language in Fiction” in Katherine Mansfield: International Approaches (2022).

"Katherine Mansfield was not her ‘real’ name, but in Germany she chose to have another. What was she doing there, in disguise in a little spa town, married to one man but pregnant to another, submitting herself to the hosings, the ‘overbody wash’, the barefoot walking and vegetarian diet, observing the locals with a wickedly comic yet accurate and essentially charitable eye, and writing brilliant stories about them which she would come to dismiss, wrongly many believe, as ‘juvenile’. There has always been so much mystery about this early period in the life of one destined to ‘alter for good and all our notion of what goes to make a story’ (Elizabethe Bowen), to influence the writing and elicit the envy of Virginia Woolf, to help define by example what is meant by the term ‘literary Modernism’, and to cement herself for ever into the literary consciousness of her homeland, New Zealand. It is to Worishofen her mother brings the young Katherine in 1909, leaving her there to deal with her predicament alone, and returning home to New Zealand to strike her unmanageable daughter out of her will. There more than a hundred years later a small iron statue of Katherine sits reading beside a pond in a woodsy park, a town square bears her name, and a collocation of international scholars gathers to discuss and read papers about the mysteries of her sojourn ‘in a German pension’. The present book publishes their deliberations."

--C.K. Stead, ONZ, CBE, FRSL, Professor Emeritus, University of Auckland 

"This elegant and timely volume brings into focus Mansfield’s creative process as it emerged through crucial encounters, influences, and exchanges, from her earliest engagement with 19^th century German music and poetry to her legacy in the German Democratic Republic. Katherine Mansfield and Germany contributes new understandings of modernism’s locations and its cultural formations. The essays and introduction are written with inspiring liveliness, sophistication and clarity, making this volume a pleasure to read and learn from."

--Rishona Zimring, Professor of English, Lewis & Clark College

"Katherine Mansfield has long been recognised as a writer whose sensibilities were shaped by transnational, transcultural influences and imaginaries. Katherine Mansfield and Germany maps an aspect to this expansive worldview that has been deserving of far greater attention. The early stories Mansfield first published in the journal The New Age, based on her seven-month stay in Germany, receive especially insightful re-readings. What emerges across this book is a deeper understanding of the ways in which Mansfield was energised by other national literatures and cross-cultural exchanges." 

--Chris Mourant, Lecturer in 20^th Century Literature, University of Birmingham