Provides new reflections on literary influence using Katherine Mansfield as a case study

Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence seeks to understand influence, a powerful yet mysterious and undertheorised impetus for artistic production, by exploring Katherine Mansfield’s wide net of literary associations. Mansfield’s case proves that influence is careless of chronologies, spatial limits, artistic movements and cultural differences. Expanding upon theories of influence that focus on anxiety and coteries, this book demonstrates that it is as often unconscious as it is conscious, and can register as satire, yearning, copying, homage and resentment. This book maps the ecologies of Mansfield’s influences beyond her modernist and postcolonial contexts, observing that it roams wildly over six centuries, across three continents and beyond cultural and linguistic boundaries.

Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence identifies Mansfield’s involvement in six modes of literary influence - Ambivalence, Exchange, Identification, Imitation, Enchantment and Legacy. In so doing, it revisits key issues in Mansfield studies, including her relationships with Virginia Woolf, John Middleton Murry and S. S. Koteliansky, as well as the famous plagiarism case regarding Anton Chekhov. It also charts new territories for exploration, expanding the terrain of Mansfield’s influence to include writers as diverse as Colette, Evelyn Waugh, Nettie Palmer, Eve Langley and Frank Sargeson.

Key Features
- Extends upon models of literary influence that are oriented around the ideas of anxiety and coteries
- Engages with and develops areas of scholarly inquiry investigating modernism as the product of social and intellectual networks
- Offers new interpretations of Mansfield’s relationships with writers with whom she is often associated, such as D H Lawrence, Anton Chekhov and Virginia Woolf
- Traces new connections between Mansfield’s work and the work of writers not previously linked to Mansfield, such as Evelyn Waugh, Colette and Nettie Palmer

Sarah Ailwood is Assistant Professor in the School of Law & Justice at the University of Canberra, Australia.

Melinda Harvey is Lecturer in English at Monash University, Australia.