Illness, gender, and writing : the case of Katherine Mansfield
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Illness, gender, and writing : the case of Katherine Mansfield
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994
- Other Title
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Illness, gender & writing
Available at 18 libraries
Note
Includes select bibliography (p. 193-205) and index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Katherine Mansfield is remembered for writing short stories that helped to initiate the modernist period in British fiction, and for the fact that her life - lived at a feverish pace on the fringes of Bloomsbury during the World War One - ended after a prolonged battle with pulmonary disease when she was only 34 years old. The author argues that while her life was marred by emotional and physical afflictions of the most extreme kind, her stories seemed to exist in isolation from those afflictions - as stylish expressions of the "new", as romantic triumphs of art over tragic circumstances, or as wavering expressions of Mansfield's early feminism. This book looks at the continuum of a writer's life and work in terms of that writer's various illnesses. Burgan explores Katherine Mansfield's recurrent emotional and physical ailments as the ground of her writing. Mansfield is remarkably suited to this appproach, Burgan contends, because her "illnesses" ranged from such early psychic confusions as separation anxiety, body image disturbances, and fear of homosexuality to severe bodily crises that included miscarriage and abortion, venereal disease and tuberculosis.
Offering a thorough reading of Mansfield's major texts, "Illness, Gender and Writing" shows how Mansfield negotiated the illnesses in a way that sheds new light on the study of women's creativity. Mansfield's drive toward self-integration, Burgan concludes, informed her strategy for writing - and for staying alive.
by "Nielsen BookData"