Fifth Annual Essay Competition - Winner Announced

27 November 2013

The Katherine Mansfield Society is pleased to announce the winner of its fifth international essay competition, on the theme of ‘Katherine Mansfield and World War One’. The judges, Professor Sydney Janet Kaplan (Professor of English, University of Washington, Seattle), Dr Santanu Das (Reader in English Literature, King’s College London) and Professor Margaret Higonnet (Professor of English, University of Connecticut), agreed on the winner unanimously, from a wide field of excellent entries.

The winning essay by Professor Josiane Paccaud-Huguet. entitled ‘“By what name are we to call death?”: The case of  “An Indiscreet Journey”’, examines the connections between death and eroticism in Mansfield’s war writings. Drawing on a wide range of references (Agamben, Freud, Lacan), Professor Paccaud-Huguet illuminates Mansfield’s famous war story through a close reading alongside the genres of the fairy tale and the mystery play, whilst simultaneously suggesting that the story ‘deals with the real substance of war experience’. The judges praised both the originality of her argument, and the elegance and fluidity of her writing.

Josiane Paccaud-Huguet is Professor of Modern English Literature and Literary Theory at Université Lumière-Lyon 2, France. She has published extensively on Modernist authors (Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Malcolm Lowry, Virginia Woolf). She is currently completing a monograph entitled The Real Thing: The Modernist Moment of Vision, which includes a chapter on Katherine Mansfield. A founding member of the Katherine Mansfield Society, she will receive a prize of £200, and her essay will appear in the Society’s annual yearbook, Katherine Mansfield Studies (Volume 6), to be published in September 2014 by Edinburgh University Press (and sent free to all Society members).