Rhythm: Parody and (Post)Colonial Modernism
Rhythm: Parody and (Post)Colonial Modernism
Chapter 2 examines Mansfield’s contributions to the self-consciously ‘modernist’ little magazine Rhythm, edited by John Middleton Murry. Through an analysis of Mansfield’s ‘parodic translations’ and short story contributions to the magazine, the chapter examines the ways in which Mansfield used Rhythm as a performative space in which to develop multiple authorial identities and cultivate different national registers in her work, employing parody, satire and mimicry as modes of critique. Whilst Mansfield identified with the metropolitan modernism advanced by the magazine, it is argued, she also sought to introduce aspects of cultural difference into Rhythm that challenged the spatial imaginaries upon which its discourse of communal affiliation had been constituted. As such, the chapter examines the ways in which Mansfield’s contributions to Rhythm figure an ambivalent negotiation of the colonial/metropolitan binary, helping us to reposition her as a proto-postcolonial writer or ‘colonial-metropolitan modernist’.
Keywords: Rhythm, John Middleton Murry, parody, translation, short story, mimicry, metropolitan, community, colonial, postcolonial
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