Materiality in Modernist Short Fiction
Lived Things
Laura Oulanne
ISBN 9780367741891
Routledge
182 Pages
£120.00
PRESENTATION
Materiality in Modernist Short Fiction provides a fresh approach to reading material things in modern fiction, accounting for the interplay of the material and the cultural. This volume investigates how Djuna Barnes, Katherine Mansfield, and Jean Rhys use the short story form to evoke the material world as both living and lived, and how the spaces they create for challenging gendered social norms can also be nonanthropocentric spaces for encounters between the human and the nonhuman. Using the unique knowledge created by literary works to spark new conversations between phenomenology, cognitive studies, and new materialisms, complemented with a feminist perspective, this book explores how literature can touch the basic experience of being in, feeling and making sense of a material world that is itself alive and active. From a sensitive reading of how three women used the material world to make their readers see, feel, and question the norms shaping our experience, this volume draws a theory of reading affective materiality that illuminates modernism and the short story form but also reaches beyond them.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgements
List of Figures
List of Abbreviations
1. Introduction
Reading Things, Senses, and Meanings
Intricate Things on the Page: the Modernist Short Fiction of Djuna Barnes, Katherine Mansfield, and Jean Rhys
2. Powerful Things
Ironical Spirits and Living Mannequins: Jean Rhys, Magic, and Surrealism
Dolls, Boots, and Madames: Djuna Barnes Rewrites Fetishism
3. Lively Things
Djuna Barnes’s Piled-up and Entangled Assemblages
Katherine Mansfield Writing a Nonhuman Life
4. Touching Things
Nice Things: Materiality and Positive affect in Katherine Mansfield’s and Jean Rhys’s Stories
The Affective Journeys of Djuna Barnes’s and Katherine Mansfield’s Stories
5. Making Sense of Things
Masses and Vividnesses: the Aesthetics and Ethics of The Left Bank
At the Indifferent Bay: Nonhuman Perspectives and Meaning in Katherine Mansfield’s Stories
Djuna Barnes’s Detail and the Materiality of the Symbolic
6. Conclusion: Reading Affective Materiality