“The greatest of all garden parties:” the Great War, Memory and Cultural Myths in Katherine Mansfield’s Critical Writing
Keywords:
Katherine Mansfield, The Athenaeum, World War I, The Great War, myth, memoryAbstract
The attitude of modernists to myths, remembering and their understanding of the role of memory in art were by no means unequivocal. On the one hand, many central works of modernism engage in the critical rewriting of myths and this is also the time when an awareness of the existence of cultural myths in the broader sense emerged; on the other, however, the pursuit of newness, central for the modernist aesthetics, made the relationship to remembering problematic. Katherine Mansfield’s critical works serve as a brilliant illustration of these tensions and among the most interesting are her reviews of the contemporary literature dealing with World War I and the cultural myths attached to it. Mansfield uncovers and analyses a whole range of approaches from the mythical presentation of war as “a cleansing fire” to the use of the fashionable topic of war trauma by authors who have not undergone the “change of heart” that Mansfield deemed necessary after the war experience. This paper discusses Katherine Mansfield’s critique of post-war literature, identifying her understanding of memory and how it should be used by writers. Her views on how literature should deal with war and reflect post-war reality will be analyzed, as will be how Mansfield approaches common war myths in her critical works.
References
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