CFP: Katherine Mansfield: Masked and Unmasked

21 November 2011

February 8-11, 2013

Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

‘Don’t lower your mask until you have another mask prepared beneath – as terrible as you like – but a mask,’ wrote Mansfield in wrote Mansfield in a letter to John Middleton Murry in July 1917.

Victoria University welcomes Katherine Mansfield scholars to Wellington in 2013 to share and discuss recent developments in Mansfield scholarship, in the year of the 90th anniversary of her death.   To coincide with the conference, it is anticipated that a new Katherine Mansfield sculpture, "Woman of Words," by Virginia King, will stand newly mounted in Lambton Quay, and the landmark publication of the Collected Fiction of Katherine Mansfield, edited by Gerri Kimber and Vincent O'Sullivan, will be launched by Edinburgh University Press.  This collection includes new fragments and variants, and other rarely published, previously uncollected stories.

Keynote speakers include Angela Smith and Sydney Janet Kaplan

Gerri Kimber and Vincent O'Sullivan will introduce and discuss the new edition of the stories

The panel welcomes a wide range of approaches to the conference theme, from the biographical to the stylistic to the performative.   Topics might include, but are certainly not limited to:

• real and fictional characters
• Modernism and the mask
• Mansfield's theatre sketches and/or performance poetry
• editing and/or translating Mansfield's work
• versions, retellings, imitations
• impersonation and performance
• biography and identity
• Modernism and the primitive
• the terrible and the hidden
• the Modernist short story

Please e-mail 250-400 word abstracts in body of email to Anna Jackson (anna.jackson@vuw.ac.nz) and Harry Ricketts (harry.ricketts@vuw.ac.nz).  We also welcome suggestions for three-person panels.

Please include with your proposal the following information: name and affiliation, email address, postal address, telephone number