Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
AN AVANT-GARDE WRITER
CHAPTER - I
A radical break with the past and concurrent search for new forms of
movement which flourished in the first decades of the 20' century. It is not a term to
which a single meaning can be ascribed. It may be applied both to the content and to
the form of a work, or to either in isolation. It reflects a sense of cultural crisis which
was both exciting and disquieting, that it opened up a whole new vista of human
possibilities at the same time putting into question any previously accepted means of
absolute.
late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The term encompasses the
activities and output of those who felt the "traditional" form of art,
38-39).
Like other literary movements, it is not clearly stated when modem period
modernism started in 1890 and ended in about 1930, or a 'time less concept'. The
starting point of modernism is the crisis of belief that pervades twentieth century
the shattering of cultural symbols and norms (Childs, P.2000 48). Moreover
migration of people fiom country to cities, new psychological ideas, as well as the
attitude toward the Great War and the Second World War at the end of the nineteenth
The period between the 1890s and the First World War was a period of
transition. Writers are acutely aware of changes in society, particularly those relating
Victorian era are lost, and the modern age loomed as a frightening, unknowable
fiom commerce to philosophy, with the goal of finding that which was 'holding back'
progress, and replacing it with new ways of reaching the same end.
The word 'modem' -comes from the Latin "modo" which means 'current'.
This word is not only connected with modernism as such, but it has a wide range of
definitions because critics avoid providing one. Drabble, M. (2000 698) sees
Europe, to movements, school in literature, art and music fiom the end of the
period in literature is believed to have begun in the sixteenth century and modem
English, even earlier, in the Middle Ages. At first, modernism was called the
themselves as attempting to over throw some aspect of tradition or the status quo
literary movement. Unlike Romanticism, modernism was not a single movement but
imagism, vorticism, dadaism, futurism and surrealism. Its forbearers are Darwin,
Marx, Nietzche, and Freud. Further some critics believed that modemism was only
a collective term for authors who belong to the literary movement. 'Modernist' was
used in the sixteenth century to describe a modern person and later in the eighteenth
century it was associated with a follower of modem ways and supporter of modem
complexity, its formalism, and its attempt to create a 'tradition of new'. Twentieth
political economy and psychology, the emulative effect of educational reforms, the
changing position of women, and rising nationalist movements both at home and in
the colonies. .
who had questioned the certainities that had supported traditional modes of social
organization, religion, and morality are Friedrich Nietzsehe, Karl Man, Sigmund
reasons. Science had in many ways dismantled the certainties of previous ages.
Darwinism had shaken people's faith in the Genesis or in a divine creator, and the
with life's crisis. At the centre of this crisis were the new technologies of science, the
power of human beings to create, improve, and reshape their environment, with the
In the twentieth century, the social processes that bring this maelstrom
amazing variety of visions and ideas that aim to make men and women the
change the world that is changing them, to make it their way through the
maelstrom and make it their own. Over the past century, these visions and
Malcom Bradbury and James Mc Farlone have shown how previous decades
to distilled with an Anglo -American critical tradition. It identifies five key modernist
tendencies: the movement away !?om representational realism towards abstract and
autotelic art fonns; a high degree of aesthetic self-consciousness; an aesthetic of
radical innovation, fragmentation, and shock; the breaking of familiar formal and
Like wise, in the much earlier 'A Glossary of literary terms', a well-known
The specijc features sign$ed by 'modernism ' vary with the user, but many
critics agree that it involves a deliberate and radical break with some of the
traditional bases both of western culture and of western art ... A prominent
feature of modernism is the phenomenon of an avant-garde... that is, a small,
self- conscious group of artists and authors who undertake, in Ezra Pound's
they undertake to create ever-new artistic forms and styles and to introduce
Both definitions emphasize the centrality of a conscious break with past to all
as 'a breaking away from established rules, traditions and conventions' which reveals
'fiesh ways of looking at man's position and function in the universe and many
and how to use it and with writing itself. Modernist texts at the beginning of the
twenty first century, as all three definitions suggest, modernism in synonymous with
a changing world.
As the twentieth century progressed, the drive to embrace the modem note
deliberately revolutionary, 'a doing away with the failures of the past and a side
stepping of all those fallen pillars'. The writer Gertrude Stein urged artists to "kill the
be privileged in critical crisis decades after the publication of 'Make it New' in 1934.
The novel thrived in the early years of this century, and so did the idea of the
novel which, among the modernists, was turning into a very different creature.
According to the literary theories of Flaubert and Henry James, style and form were
everything, or almost everything, and subject matter was unimportant. The novel was
concern of the greatest novelists of the period including Marcel Proust, James Joyce,
Joseph Conard, Ford Madox Ford, Virginia Woolf and D.H. Lawrence.
firom literature and art to sex, family life and international relations. Bloomsbury in
this sense had a profound effect on Britain, although its. truly international. figures
were few, the most notable being the economist Keynes, J.M. (1883-1946) and the
experimental novelist. Besides her own work, she was a stimulating commentator in
her luminously intelligent essays and in her feminist criticism, A Room of One's own,
1929. Her early novels, The Voyage Out (1915, but written earlier) and Night and Day
(1919) were relatively realistic. The interval between them was largely occupied with
Hogarth press, which published Katherine Mansfield and T.S. Eliot among others.
established in the 1920's by Jacob's Room (1922), based on the life and death of
explore male-female conflict and based on her parents; and The Waves (1931), her
most boldly experimental (and difficult) novel, and considered by some critics as her
master piece. The eponymous Orlando (1928) is alternatively male and female
through four centuries. Something of a departure, it was her most successful novel
and dedicated to vita Sackville west, a woman of shared affinities. Her last novel
Poetry of the modern period, as one literary historian puts it, 'has not escaped
the atmosphere of controversy.' Few groups of poets have endured such censure as
the English 'Georgians' (1920s) seen as artificial and shallow. French symbolism
under the vigorous leadership of Breton, A. (1896-1966) to over turn all accepted
doctrine in poetry and the arts. Other influential movements included German
(1924). It was a successor to the brief movement known as Dadaism, which emerged
in 1916 out of disgust with the brutality and destructiveness of the First World War,
and set out, according to its Manifestos, to engender a negative art and literature that
would destroy the false values of modern bourgeois society, including its rationality
and the art and literature it had fostered. Among the experiments of Dadaism were, for
a time, artists, and poets such as Tristan Tzara, Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, and Max
Emst.
The expressed aim of surrealism was a revolt against all restraints on free
creativity, including logical reason, standard morality, social and artistic conventions
and norms, and all control over the artistic process by fore thought and intention. To
ensure the unhampered operation of the "deep mind", which they regarded as the only
(writing delivered over to the promptings of the unconscious mind), and to exploiting
the material of dreams, of states of mind between sleep and waking, and of natural or
Futurist poetry should strive for. Poetry, the predominate medium in Futurist poetry
has an unexpected combinations of images and hyper-conciseness. The Futurists
called their style of poetry 'parole in liberta' in which all ideas of meter were rejected
and the word became the main unit of concern. In this way, the Futurist managed to
create a new language free of syntax, punctuation, and metrics that allowed for free
expression.
The two most powerful forces on Modernist poetry in Britian came from
France and the United States. The first brought symbolism and vers libre (free verse),
the second a hybrid Anglo-American Imagism and the dry, contemplative, intellectual
introduced by French writer during the second half of the 1gthcentury. It emerged as
a reaction against Realism, which put a belief upon the objective world. But for the
symbolist the objective world was not through reality but rather a mere reflection of
the absolute one. They believe that true realities of nature can be perceived by the
work of art. And artist possesses a power to create the universe of his own, but the
reader cannot share her or his emotion directly. Therefore everything should be
suggested by symbols which are necessary to express what they experienced. These
tendencies of giving more focus in the art gave birth to the symbolism. The
symbolists never describe things directly; instead they use one thing to suggest
another. Charle's Baudelaire in France and W.B. Yeats in England are known to be
The most influential figure was Stephane Mallarme whose advice to depict not
the thing but the effect is a kind of symbolist motto. He advocated a new drama
portraying the mental life, not the world of the senses. For the symbolist, art is
a means of understanding rather than feeling, and since they despised mundane
reality, the symbolists were antagonistic towards Realist drama. Symbolist drama
Realism in drama encouraged Realism in the theatre-in sets and stage craft, as
well as acting. Among the leaders in this development were Sir Henry Irving at the
Lyceum Theatre in London, where he induced nightly fainting fits with his highly
detailed production of the famous melodrama, The Bells (1871); Duke George I1 of
Saxe- Meiningen, who with his actress-wife formed a touring company in which the
the genres, even though their perceived radicalism was too great for contemporary
modernists in Britain, such as T.S Eliot, W.B.Yeats, D.H. Lawrence and Wyndham
Lewis, and was also evident across Europe in the Movements better known for their
fine art; most notably expressionism, Italian Futurism, Dadaist Cabaret and Antonin
An invention of the nineteenth century, the modern short story has been
emotional response. As such, critics have made formal distinctions between the short
story and its generic predecessor, the tale, a short narrative sometimes of oral origin.
Likewise, commentators have contrasted the short story with the lengthier novella and
characters, and intersecting lines of plot. European and American writers first
articulated the formal qualities of the modern short story in the second quarter of the
Early innovations in the genre appeared in the short fictional prose of such writers as
Prosper Merirnee, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Walter Scott, and Nikolai
Gogol, to name only a few. The short story is traditionally thought to have reached
a peak of maturity in continental Europe during the late nineteenth century with the
Naturalistic pieces of Guy de Maupassant and Anton Chekhov, and a generation later
American tradition.
States, with his collection of tales called the Sketch Book (1820) often desaibed as a
foundational text. Including the outstanding pieces Rip Van Winkle and The Legend
of Sleepy Hollow, the Sketch Book foreshadowed the future development of the short
story in America with its blend of incisive wit, satire and narrative virtuosity. After
Irving, scholars generally focus on Edgar Allan Poe as a crucial figure in the
development of the short story. In his 1842 essay on Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-
Told Tales (1837) Poe outlined the principal features of the genre, claiming that it
should be readable in one sitting and that its effect, similar to that of lyric poetry,
should be singular and total, designed to evoke a primary emotional reaction in the
horror and detective fiction collected in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque ( 1 840)
and later volumes, exemplified his evolving theories. Meanwhile, Hawthorne's short
stories in Twice-Told Tales and Mosses fiom an Old Manse (1846) offered an
innovative blend of allegorical symbolism and internalized character study that, while
Herman Melville's Piazza Tales (1856) including the stories "Bartleby, the Scrivener"
poems and short stories, mostly set in India and Burma during the time of British rule.
His stories show form, shortness, construction, completeness and no loose ends. The
than an entertainer. He is one of the inventors of a new type of short story where
evocations of nature that really matter in the short stories of Lawrence, than the plot.
psychological insights are provided. Anton Chekhov a Russian dramatist and a short
story writer, is one of the foremost figures in Russian literature. He was largely
responsible for the modern type of short story that depends for effect on mood and
symbolism rather than on plot. His narratives, rather than having a climax and
resolution, are a thematic arrangement of impression and ideas, using themes relating
to the every day life of the landed gentry and professional middle class, Chekhov
portrayed the pathos of life in Russia before the 1905 revolution: the futile, boring,
and lonely lives of people unable to communicate with one another. Early literary
Pound and Joyce in England, and Gide and Proust in France, ignoring the work of the
female writers of the time, believing them to be of little or no interest. According to
Virginia Woolf (1966 320) in or about December 1910, human character changed.
She was r e h i n g to the end of the Edwardian era, together with the Post-Impressionist
exhibition mounted by Roger Fry in London at the end of 1910, with the implication
that all forms of traditional mimetic representation, both in literature as well as art,
born in Wellington, New Zealand, on October 14, 1888. Katherine Mansfield showed
an early interest and talent for literature. At the age of nine years, attending the
village school in the township of Karori in the New Zealand inland, she won the first
prize for English composition. At the age of fourteen, Mansfield and her two sisters
of stories which she wrote when convalescing in Germany. But it was not until the
collection 'Bliss and Other Stories' (1920) that Katherine Mansfield's literary career
took off. The book included some of her best short stories, such as Bliss,Prelude and
Dying the period 1910-191 1, Katherine Mansfield wrote for the New Age and
its editor R.A. Orage. In December 1911, Katherine Mansfield met her future
husband, John Middleton Murry, an Oxford undergraduate who at the time edited
a 'youthful literary magazine' called Rhythm together with Michael Sadleir. In this
first contribution was 'The Woman at the Store' (1912), which caused 'a minor
sensation'. In the winter of 1915, Katherine Mansfield, John Middleton Muny and
D.H. Lawrence started a small literary magazine called 'Signature' which was written
by themselves, but the magazine died within two months and three numbers. In 1919,
John Middleton Murry became editor of 'The Athenaeum' where Katherine Mansfield
wrote weekly criticism of novels, and, after a short time, also contributed monthly
short'stories. In the period 1918-1919 J e oe Parle Pas Francols was printed and
published by John Middleton Murry and his brother for private circulation. In 1918,
Prelude was published as a separate piece by Virginia and Leonard Woolf at their
Hogarth Press.
recognized, and publishers started to ask her for more stories. After 'Bliss and Other
Stories', the next collection, 'The Garden Party and Other Stories' was completed
while she was based in Switzerland in the autumn of 1921. Katherine Mansfield
England. Her volumes published posthumously are 'The Doves Nest and Other
Stories' (June 1923) and 'Something Childish and Other Stories' (1924). Katherine
Mansfield died in January 1923 at the 'Gurdieff Institute for the Harmonious
Development of Man' in France, after suffering from tuberculosis for nearly five
years.
metropolitan centers of Europe from the distant margins of empire was Katherine
Mansfield. And migrate she did, in the fullest sense, to the heart of the metropolis
where human character was being "changed" by the intellectual and aesthetic power
of the avant-grade. She was to claim and receive a complex membership in the very
core of this power Woolf s Bloomsbury group. Similar to many other members of the
elite Bloomsbury circle, Katherine Mansfield was a major influence in shaping the
stories, a stifling sense of a dull, uneventful everyday life as an index of the socio-
cultural inadequacy that the colonial periphery comes to identity in itself Specifically,
her stories reveal the unique socio-psychological process through which the emotion
historical constrictions on the life of the settler colony. As a colonial writer Katherine
controversial because it divides readers into two camps: those who cherish the short
story for itself and those who consider the short story as a mere practice for the more
sustained work of writing long fiction. Elsewhere, she makes an important distinction
The modernist short story grew out of the psychological sketch of the
that the pleasing shape and coherence -of the traditional short story
examples until the twentieth century, whereas the opposite was true in France, with
a well established high quality tradition, dating back at least two centuries. The
ascendancy of the modem short story in Eng1an.d was concurrent with the emergence
of modernism. The 'old-fashioned' story with a plot, is now set against 'a slice-of-
'Modernism' was also used at the end of the eighteenth century to refer to
trends characteristic of modem times and in the nineteenth century it was associated
with modern opinions, styles or expressions. Only in the 1960's was the term
opposed to contemporary writers of the moment. The roots of modernism are believed
to be in the works of French authors Charles Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert who
described 'Modernity ' as the fashionable, fleeting and contingent, and or in the works
Katherine Mansfield herself h e w that she was searching for the new, the
The form I would choose has changed utterly. I feel no longer concerned
with the same appearances of things. The people who lived or whom I wish
stories leave me perfiectly cold. [...I but especially I want to write a kind of
long elegy ... perhaps not in poetry. No, perhaps in prose. Almost
influence of the poetic genius of Baudelaire extended on her is noticed. The way the
influence manifested itself in her work reveals how it enabled Katherine Mansfield to
London in 1908, aged twenty, as, 'a girl in a hostel writing things, struggling quite
alone to discover a form with no idea where to turn for the critical guidance that every
Unlike many older writers who had learned their craft through imitation
of narrative experimentation.
She was certainly one of the first 'modem' women writers, attempting a
writing career in a field dominated by men, while living alone in a foreign city at a
young age. For Alpers, A. (1980 81) her main difficulty at this time was precisely
She was not by nature a novelist -she had nothing to offer to publishers of
books her aim was something else - to "intensi$ the so-called small things
So that truly everything is significant ". The short story in that sense did
not exist in England yet. There was no place for what she wished to do.
No place, either,for what young Joyce had been up to, over in Dublin.
Wheeler, K. (1994 125) expresses ail the definitions of the Modemist short
story which have evolved over the years and Katherine Mansfield's work into this
body of evidence:
conventions are used in the service of the greater expression of the interior
virtual non-existence. One could argue that Mansfield artfilly hid the
In the evolution of literary modernism during the first quarter of the twentieth
century, Katherine Mansfield can be placed within the movement because of the work
she produced together with the philosophy which lies behind her narrative art.
Kaplan, S.J. (1991 1-2) comments explains about the significance and
modernism, who have nearly erased herfrom the history of the movement,
but it would not have surprised critics during the 1920s or 1930s, when
her realization that the symbolism of the aesthetes could bejoined, as well,
feminist. Her use of the '90s influence veers away from the occult,
abstract direction it took with Yeats,for example, and it never goes to the
and metafiction.
For many readers, both in England and especially in France, the perception
was that she was writing children's fiction. Though children may be depicted in many.
of her most famous stories, her themes are adult in both form and content. However,
the notional superficiality of her stories, made the critics perceive her 'form' to be
particular ways during her lifetime and in rather different ways after her death
a rejection of the conventional plot structure and the dramatic action in favour of the
presentation of character through narrative voice. Dominic Head (1992 16) says that :
against the less well structured, often psychological story; the "Slice - of-
Chekhov; indeed, she is perhaps one of the earliest writers in English to make use of
Mansfield in the context of world literature is a writer whose origins and interests
the centralfigure in the development of the modem short story, she har often
inner mood and impression rather than on external event. Until the twentieth century,
the English Short Story had in general retained the well-proven services of the audible
narrator, a figure whose function was to establish values, scene and tone. But in
without a palpable narrator to stand between the reader and the truths he perceives.
By dispensing with the narrator. it got rid of explaining. It lent itself to the portrayal
of every day life and forswore long periods of time. In this type of narrative the
believed that fiction did not have to be shaped towards a conclusion, a climax,
experience of actual life itself. The writer obliterates herself and becomes the
The turn of 20' century also gave rise to the plot less story, owing to the
intellectual climate of this period. In a world where God was dead and evolutionary
only alternative seemed to be the retreat within, to the compensating powers of the
imagination with such a retreat came the stress on the significant moment or epiphany
who followed in Chekhovian style was James Joyce. The most important contribution
introduction of the 'epiphany', the meaning of which was first described in 17re
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. In the view of Drabble, M. (2000 332)
epiphany means the sudden 'revelation of what ness of a thing ', the moment in which
the soul of the commonest object seems to us radian. Epiphany was later on wed by
Gurr, A., and Hanson, C. (1998 131) have pointed out, underlining in particular her
skillful use of fiee indirect speech: Katherine Mansfield's development offree indirect
form was one of her most important contn'htiom to the art of the short story. Such
a form allows for directness and immediacy, enabling the intrusive presence of the
them.
interested in what happens but in how one feels. Her stories are built around
illuminations of character rather than plot developments.
Symbolism is the art of expressing ideas and emotions not by defining them
through overt comparisons with concrete images, but by suggesting what these ideas
and emotions are, by recreating them in the mind of the reader through the w e of
unexplained symbols. To name an object in a literary work is to banish the major part
of the enjoyment derived from the work, since this enjoyment consists in a process of
gradual revelation. By using symbols in the work, author enhances aesthetic
enjoyment through the process of gradual revelation. Besides, the w e of images and
symbols allow language to embody non-verbal experience.
The range of character portrayal is narrow and circumscribed, but they have
the capacity to enter into the hearts and souls of the characters and to project their
emotions in such a way that we accept them as universally true. She succeeded in
within the family. She makes the small happening of children luminous by
flood-lighting them. Their characters have no pedigree. They neither are devoid of
the details of the history of their forebears nor are they invested with details
environment and their desires and motives are depicted with skill.
writer of the everyday in the Second Sex (New York; Vintage, 1987), citing several
passages from Katherine Mansfield's work as evidence of the sudden revelations that
seize respectable, seemingly conventional women, but it is only in recent years that
important female modernist author. She did not publicly align herself with feminist
cause or because she did not author a feminist manifesto as her contemporary Virginia
Woolf had done with A Room of one 5 O w n which made Virginia Woolf as the most
female subjectivity, the feminine perception of the world and its many manifestations;
on the other, she was generally uninvolved in the suffigette struggle in England
power imbalance between the sexes in society. She deals with the casual cruelty of
male sexual and economic dominance, but does not, generally, offer the possibility of
resolution. However often her stories end with women unable of unwilling to gain and
techniques and a shifting of the point of view from one character to another are other
wmmon features in her short fiction. The questioning of one's identity in her writing
can be attributed to the sudden interest in psychology that arose in her time;
particularly to the publication of Freud, by the Hogarth Press. Jean, M., and
O'Rourke, R. (1991 114) state that it led to an interest in the unconscious and
questions of sexual behaviour, mortality and influence. From the symbolists she also
inspiration. Arthur Sewell conveys the unique quality of Katherine Mansfield's style
thus:
Words only capture the "whole of the mind" when they are used poetically,
when the over-tones are given by shadows that memory and association may cart
over words - when words have a phantom -. life as well as sound and meaning
She is often an intensely lyrical writer, whose prose frequently has poetical
Mansfield's stories are rarely about events; that is, although things may and do
happen, the focus of the stories is on the language that makes sense of these
happenings. While the beauty of her language and her uie of complex symbolism
have always been appreciated by critics, the extent to which Katherine Mansfield's
stories may also be read as providing critiques of her society has been emphasized in
hdamental to the experience of reading her work. The formal innovations of her
writing play an integral part in its engagement with the world. The oblique nature of
Katherine Mansfield's writing also means that, while her stories imply a critique of
history; nor do they provide ready answers to readers who probe them for specific
concerns her symbolic use of imagery, the seductive, rhythmical qualities of her
stories have remained popular and in print, and her biography has proved a source of
Mansfield's life in her introduction to the selected stories 2002, in which she
emphasizes the importance of the experiences of colonial life for Katherine Mansfield
in writing. During the decade following her death, John Middleton Muny, edited and
published her letters and other writings. Subsequent critics have felt the need to
'rescue' Katherine Mansfield h m reductively biographical readings of her work and
especially fiom the legend created by John Middleton Muny. More recent biographies
and authoritative editions of her letters and notebooks have made possible a more
complete and independent picture of her life and work. Mean while, criticism has
increasingly tried to move beyond reading her stories for their biographical interest
and for their purely formal qualities and consider their writer in literary and historical