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Katherine Mansfield and the (Post)colonial. JanetWilson, Gerri Kimber, and Delia da Sousa Correa, eds. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Pp. ix + 210. $99.95 (cloth).
For this fifth annual volume of Katherine Mansfield Studies, guest editor Janet Wilson and the series editors Gerri Kimber and Delia da Sousa Correa have assembled a cohesive selection of critical essays, creative writing, and archival reports to highlight several recent currents in postcolonial considerations of Mansfield and her oeuvre. Past studies of Mansfield have often subsumed the postcolonial within more pressing critical interventions, like establishing Mansfield's place in the modernist canon, evaluating her feminist aesthetics, and revising biographical details after recovering those letters, journals, and fragments John Middleton Murry omitted. Thankfully, space has been opened in the field for in-depth critical analyses like this present volume. As a whole, these pieces demonstrate how Mansfield aligns (post)colonialism and modernism, while continually reiterating how her status as "the little colonial" in London catalyzed her growth into the modernist short-fiction writer she became. Wilson highlights Mansfield's prescient "postcolonial vision," an "anticipatory discourse" through which Mansfield "demonstrates a consciousness about resistance that precedes the founding of the postcolonial state" (1). Thus, the parentheses in (post)colonial of the title indicate that Mansfield straddles a time and space divide between the colonial and postcolonial state-one of many ambivalences that the volume investigates.
Many of these essays draw attention to Mansfield's consciousness of the position she inhabited, conceptualized through Bhabha's "third space" and Freud's Unheimliche-an ambivalence to place heightened by the fact that to become an expatriate from New Zealand she had to return "home" to...