Provides new reflections on literary influence using Katherine Mansfield as a case study. It is commonplace to talk about writers in terms of their similarities with and differences from other writers but how does literary influence actually work? This book seeks to understand this mysterious but powerful impetus for artistic production through an examination of 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 and has many 'shades' or 'tones'. Expanding upon theories of influence that focus on anxiety and coteries, this book shows that it is as often unconscious as it is conscious, and can be evidenced by such things as satire, plagiarism, yearning and resentment. This book seeks to map the ecologies of Mansfield's influence beyond her modernist and postcolonial contexts, observing that they roam wildly over six centuries, across three continents and beyond cultural and linguistic boundaries.
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 and 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.