Essay Prize

The Katherine Mansfield Society is pleased to announce its essay prize competition for 2013, open to all, on the subject of

KATHERINE MANSFIELD AND WORLD WAR ONE

Essays are invited that seek to examine Mansfield’s writing in relation to the First World War. Vincent O’Sullivan has asserted that, ‘[f]rom any perspective, the most important public event in Mansfield’s lifetime was the First World War’. By 1918, there were few families in Britain and many of its colonies whose lives had not been directly affected by the conflict. The war was represented, both during and after the event, as Armageddon, as a flood, as the death of a generation. Mansfield was part of that generation. She lost her brother in the conflict. In 1915 she travelled, illegally, to the war zone near the Belgian border. Later she witnessed the after-effects of gas poisoning as the injured were brought in their thousands through the stations of Paris. Mansfield wrote, criticising Woolf, that to write without relation to the war was a ‘lie in the soul’. We welcome submissions that consider Mansfield’s response to the war, directly or obliquely, both in her fiction and her personal writing.

The winner will receive a cash prize of £200, and the winning essay will be considered for publication in Katherine Mansfield Studies, vol 6, 2014 (the peer-reviewed journal of the Katherine Mansfield Society, published by Edinburgh University Press).

The distinguished panel of judges will include:

Dr Santanu Das, Reader in English Literature, King’s College London
Professor Margaret Higonnet, Professor of English, University of Connecticut
Professor Sydney Janet Kaplan, Professor of English, University of Washington, Seattle

Essays in word (.docx) (.doc) format should be submitted by email attachment to:

Alice Kelly and Dr Isobel Maddison kms@katherinemansfieldsociety.org by

31 August 2013.

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The Katherine Mansfield Society is delighted to announce the winner of its fourth international essay competition, on the theme of ‘Katherine Mansfield and the (Post)colonial’. The judges, Professor Elleke Boehmer (Professor of World Literature, University of Oxford), Dr Simone Oettli (Chargée d'enseignement, University of Geneva) and Professor Janet Wilson (Vice Chair, KMS, Professor of English and Postcolonial Studies, University of Northampton), agreed on the winner unanimously from a wide field of excellent entries.

The winning essay is by Aimee Gasston. The abstract of her essay, ‘Katherine Mansfield, Cannibal’, argues that Mansfield engaged with concepts of barbarism throughout her career and displayed a particular fascination with cannibalism that held both political and aesthetic significance for her. The article traces Mansfield’s transition from ‘a negative cannibalism of revenge’ towards a ‘tender anthropophagy of incorporation’. Gasston claims that this transition allowed Mansfield to transgress displacement and find a route to her most accomplished work by returning from Europe to New Zealand through fiction.

Aimee Gasston is a PhD candidate at Birkbeck, University of London, researching the modernist short story with a focus on Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. A member of the New Zealand Studies Network (UK and Ireland) she also read a paper on Katherine Mansfield at the Network’s inaugural conference, ‘New Zealand’s Cultures: Sources, Histories, Futures’ held at Birkbeck, 6-7 July 2012. She will receive a prize of £200, and her essay will appear in the annual journal, Katherine Mansfield Studies (Volume 5), to be published in October 2013 by Edinburgh University Press (sent free to all members of the Katherine Mansfield Society).