In From The Margins--A Re-evaluation Of Katherine Mansfield

Traditionally, Katherine Mansfield is regarded as a precious miniaturist, and her reputation is of a delicate female stylist with a reassuring line in colonial nostalgia. Even when Katherine Mansfield is canonized in English literature, she is often treated as a woman writer, a short story writer and a foreigner. But her fiction demands more reading. In this thesis, I have attempted to make a re-evaluation of Katherine Mansfield's status in mainstream English literature by relocating her work in the framework of her marginalities.The thesis is mainly divided into five chapters. Chapter One is introduces Katherine Mansfield's reception and reputation. In chapter two, I discuss Mansfield writing as a woman. In her early struggle to become an artist, Mansfield felt the need to liberate herself from her weak position as a woman quite as strongly as she felt the impulse to flee from her bourgeois home. Mansfield was deeply concerned with the situation that women faced at the turn of the century. And an emerging feminist consciousness made its way into her short stories. Chapter Two examines Mansfield by looking at her writing as an exile. In London, Mansfield felt uncomfortable in a foreign society. In deep mental isolation she sought the artistic freedom in writing and created a home for herself in the New Zealand stories, hi this chapter I offer a new reading of these stories. In Chapter Three, I discuss Mansfield's literary contribution as a short story writer. In her lifetime, Mansfield was aware of the fact that short story form was an underrated literary genre. But she saw it as the best literary form that could express the spirit of the modern age. All her life, she experimented indefatigably in quest of the ideal of the perfect short story.And, I argue that Katherine Mansfield's significance as a writer whose fiction and criticism influenced, reflected and advanced British modernist aesthetic principles deserves to be acknowledged squarely.