Like many modernist writers, Katherine Mansfield was resistant to what she called the ‘“mushroom growth” of cheap psychoanalysis’, while at the same time she acknowledged the mutual imbrication of psychoanalysis and literature, describing her creative process in terms of the garnering of ‘subconscious wisdom’. This volume explores the multiple ways in which Mansfield’s fiction resonates with the landscapes opened up by psychology and psychoanalysis. In line with the recent surge of critical interest in early psychology, the contributors read Mansfield’s work alongside figures like William Jame ... More

Like many modernist writers, Katherine Mansfield was resistant to what she called the ‘“mushroom growth” of cheap psychoanalysis’, while at the same time she acknowledged the mutual imbrication of psychoanalysis and literature, describing her creative process in terms of the garnering of ‘subconscious wisdom’. This volume explores the multiple ways in which Mansfield’s fiction resonates with the landscapes opened up by psychology and psychoanalysis. In line with the recent surge of critical interest in early psychology, the contributors read Mansfield’s work alongside figures like William James, Théodule Ribot and Henri Bergson to open up new perspectives on the representation of effect and emotion in her fiction. While these essays trace strands within the intellectual milieu in which Mansfield came of age, others explore the intricate interplay between Mansfield’s fiction and Freudian theory, seeing her work as emblematic of the uncanny doubling of modernist literature and psychoanalysis. They reveal, inter alia, an unexpectedly close relationship between Freudian psychoanalysis and M. B. Oxon’s Cosmic Anatomy (an occult book which fascinated Mansfield) and draw on Freud and Lacan to draw out the specificity of Mansfield’s engagement with post-war masculinity crisis. Together, the essays open up novel ways of thinking about fiction of unrivalled psychological complexity.