Modernist Short Fiction and Things

This book reappraises the philosophical value of short fiction by Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen, examining the stories through the lens of specific everyday objects. Looking at Woolf and armchairs, Mansfield and snack food, and Bowen and fashion accessories, it probes the aesthetic resonance between these stories' form and contents and also considers the modes of thinking they might promote.
Conceiving of their short fiction as intrinsically radical and experimental even within a wider context of modernist innovation, this book shows how these important women writers brought quotidian objects to riotous life, in such a way that tasked readers with reevaluating their everyday existence. Overall, Modernist Short Fiction and Things argues that short fiction epitomises modernist aesthetics, functioning as a resonant source for investigation and complementing and expanding our understanding of modernist epistemology.

Contributes to our understanding of twentieth century women's writing in the short story form, a genre which is often conceived of as frivolous or underdeveloped but which acts as a vehicle of philosophical thought Provides an original and illuminating reading of an important but undervalued body of modernist literature Explores a genuine phenomenon - the strange use of objects in women's modernist short fiction and teases out its significance, moving from the micro to the macro level in terms of cultural and philosophical analysis

Auteur

Aimée Gasston is a Postdoctoral Visiting Research Fellow at the Institute of English Studies, School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK. Recipient of a Harry Ransom Fellowship and the fourth Katherine Mansfield Essay Prize, she co-edited Katherine Mansfield: New Directions (2020) and is Vice-Chair of the Elizabeth Bowen Society.

Contenu
Introduction.- Chapter 1: Virginia Woolf's Armchair Aesthetics.- Chapter 2: Katherine Mansfield and the Story-as-Snack.- Chapter 3: Elizabeth Bowen and Eccentric Accessories.- Conclusion: Stories and their Objects, Reading and Being.