Wilson, J. M. (2016) Katherine Mansfield and anima mundi: France and the tradition of nature personified. In: Davison, C. and Kimber, G. (eds.) Katherine Mansfield's French Lives. Leiden: Brill. pp. 127-142.
The files below are currently restricted to repository staff only.
They may be awaiting processing or under a publisher's embargo.
Items under embargo will be available for download from the date noted.
![[img]](http://nectar.northampton.ac.uk/style/images/fileicons/text.png) |
| Item Type: | Book Section |
|---|---|
| Abstract: | This chapter proposes a speculative reading of Katherine Mansfield’s work in relation to the medieval concept of anima mundi (world soul), that is, the belief in an animistic universe in which the earth is revivified through a spiritus mundi (spirit of the world). Although no explicit link can be made, I suggest that Mansfield had affinities with medieval cosmology which fostered a more participatory relationship between the human subject and the created world than the post-Cartesian world view does. I also suggest that this relationship between the self and the ‘other’ is often marked by a ‘decentring’ modernist aesthetic that enables her to represent it as odd, disturbing or disruptive. The first section of this chapter identifies central concepts associated with the belief in anima mundi, as found in the writings of the French philosophers, writers and artists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. This is followed by a discussion of three motifs associated with the tradition of nature personified that survived into modernist culture with reference to particular stories in which Mansfield seemingly rewrites them into a contemporary idiom. |
| Subjects: |
P Language and Literature > PN Literature (General) > PN56 Themes and subjects in literature P Language and Literature > PR English literature > PR8309 English literature: Provincial, local, etc. > PR9639.3 New Zealand literature |
| Creators: | Wilson, Janet M |
| Editors: | Davison, Claire and Kimber, Gerri |
| Publisher: | Brill |
| Faculties, Divisions and Institutes: |
University Faculties, Divisions and Research Centres - OLD > Research Centre > Centre for Critical and Creative Writing Research Centres > Centre for Critical and Creative Writing |
| Date: | February 2016 |
| Date Type: | Publication |
| Page Range: | pp. 127-142 |
| Title of Book: | Katherine Mansfield's French Lives |
| Series Name: | International Forschungen zur allgemeinen und vergleichenden Literaturwissenschaft |
| Volume: | 191 |
| Place of Publication: | Leiden |
| Number of Pages: | 261 |
| Language: | English |
| ISBN: | 9789004283688 |
| Media of Output: | |
| Status: | Published / Disseminated |
| Refereed: | Yes |
| Related URLs: | |
| References: | Anon., ‘Aims and Ideals’, Rhythm 1: 1 (1911), p. 36. Ascari, Maurizio, ‘Katherine Mansfield and the Gardens of the Soul’, Katherine Mansfield Studies, 2 (2010), pp. 39-55. Beer, Gillian, Virginia Woolf: The Common Ground (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996). Bergson, Henri, An Introduction to Metaphysics, tr. T. E. Hulme (New York: G.P. Putnam’s & Sons, 1912). Boruk, Todd A., Ecocriticism and Early Modern English Literature: Green Pastures (London: Routledge, 2011). Chamberlain, Richard, Radical Spenser: Pastoral, Politics and the New Aestheticism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005). Curtius, E. R., European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, tr. William R. Trask (New York: Harper & Row, 1963): 106-27. Cusack, Carole M., The Sacred Tree: Ancient and Medieval Manifestations (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011). Freud, Sigmund, Moses and Monotheism, tr. Katherine Jones. The Internet Library (The Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1939). https://archive.org/stream/mosesandmonothei032233mbp/mosesandmonothei032233mbp_djvu.txt [Accessed 1 December 2014]. Goodyear, Frederick, ‘The New Thelema’, Rhythm 1: 1 (1911), pp. 1-3. Jackson, Rosemary, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London: Routledge, 1981). Kaplan, Sydney Janet, Katherine Mansfield and the Origins of Modernist Fiction (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1991). Kimber, Gerri and Janet Wilson, eds. Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays (London: Palgrave, 2011). Kimber, Gerri and Vincent O’Sullivan, eds. The Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield 1898-1915, The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012). Kimber, Gerri and Angela Smith, eds, The Poetry and Critical Writings of Katherine Mansfield, The Edinburgh Edition of the Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield, vol. 3 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). Lawrence, D. H. ‘Remembering Pan’, in The Green Studies Reader: From Romanticism to Eco-Criticism, ed. Laurence Coupe (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 69–71. Murry, John Middleton, ‘Art and Philosophy’, Rhythm 1: 1 (1911), pp. 9–12. Mounic, Anne. ‘“Ah, What is it? – that I Heard”: The Sense of Wonder in Katherine Mansfield’s Stories and Poems’, in Kimber and Wilson, pp. 144-57. New, W. H. Reading Mansfield and Metaphors of Form (Montreal & Kingston, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999). O’Sullivan, Vincent and Margaret Scott, eds, The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield, 5 vols, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1904–2008). Orton, William, The Last Romantic (London: Cassell & Co, 1937). Paccaud-Huguet, Josiane, ‘A Trickle of Voice: Katherine Mansfield and the Modernist Moment of Being’, in Kimber and Wilson, pp. 131-43. Park, Katherine. ‘Nature in Person: Medieval and Renaissance Allegories and Emblems’, in The Moral Authority of Nature, eds Loraine Dalston and Fernando Vidal (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003), pp. 50–73. Woolf, Virginia, Mrs Dalloway (Harmondsworth: Penguin [1925] 1996). |
| URI: | http://nectar.northampton.ac.uk/id/eprint/8325 |
Actions (login required)
 |
Edit Item |
Altmetric
Altmetric