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.
- Texts
- Information
![[thumbnail of KM & ANIMA MUNDI Janet Wilson .docx]](https://nectar.northampton.ac.uk/style/images/fileicons/text.png "KM & ANIMA MUNDI Janet Wilson .docx")
Information
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:
Creators:
Wilson, J. M.
Editors:
Davison, C. and Kimber, G.
Publisher:
Brill
Faculties, Divisions and Institutes:
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:
Print
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).
 |