Re-forming World Literature

Gerri Kimber is Visiting Professor in the Department of English, University of Northampton. She is Chair of the Katherine Mansfield Society and the author of Katherine Mansfield: The Early Years (2016), Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story (2015), and Katherine Mansfield: The View from France (2008). She is series editor of the 4-volume Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield (2012-16). Janet Wilson is Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies at the University of Northampton. She has published widely on Australian and New Zealand writing and cinema, as well as on the diaspora writing of white settler societies. She is co-editor of the book series Studies in World Literature at ibidem Press and co-editor of the Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

The ground-breaking essays gathered in this volume argue that global paradigms of World Literature, often referencing the major metropolitan centres of cultural and literary production, do not always accommodate voices from the margins and writing within minority genres such as the short story. Katherine Mansfield is a supreme example of a writer who is positioned between a number of different borders and boundaries: between modernism and postcolonialism; between the short story and other genres (like the novella or poetry, or non-fiction, such as letters, diaries, reviews, and translations); between Europe and New Zealand. In pointing to the global production and dissemination of short stories, and in particular the growing reception of Mansfield's work worldwide since her death in 1923, the volume shows how literary modernism can be read in a myriad of ways in terms of the contemporary category of new World Literature.