Birthday Lecture 2018
Saturday 13 October 2pm
Institute of English Studies
Room 243, Senate House, University of London
Professor Steven Matthews, University of Reading, delivered a lecture entitled ‘Nearer than anyone else’: Katherine Mansfield, D.H. Lawrence, and the ‘modern’ short story.
Copies of the lecture are available to purchase in our online shop.
You can listen to the podcast here
Photos of the day are now available on this page
This year’s wonderful poster was created by KMS postgraduate representative, Joe Williams
Synopsis
A word frequently and understandably used to describe, and to praise, Katherine Mansfield’s writing is ‘modern’. This lecture will discuss what is implied by ‘modern’ through reflection upon the various conversations between Mansfield and D.H. Lawrence, conversations which stretched from their first meeting in 1913 almost to the time of Mansfield’s death. Mansfield finalised the stories in her two major collections across this period; Lawrence the stories eventually collected in three volumes. The lecture will focus on the experiments with short story form and content which partly emerged from the close interchanges between these different, but mutually-admiring, writers in difficult times.