Illness, gender, and writing
Subtitle: the case of Katherine Mansfield
By: Mary Burgan.
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 1994
Place of publication: Baltimore
Language: eng
Number of pages: 217
Subjects: Mansfield, Katherine, 1888-1923 -- Criticism and interpretation; Mansfield, Katherine, 1888-1923 -- Health; Feminism and literature -- New Zealand -- History -- 20th century; Women and literature -- New Zealand -- History -- 20th century; Authors, New Zealand -- 20th century -- Health and hygiene; Authorship -- Sex differences -- History -- 20th century; Psychological fiction, English -- History and criticism; Feminist fiction, English -- History and criticism; Women authors -- Health and hygiene; Psychoanalysis and literature -- New Zealand; Body, Human, in literature; Sex role in literature
Other titles: Illness, gender & writing.
Description: Katherine Mansfield is remembered for writing brilliant short stories that helped to initiate the modernist period in British fiction, and for the fact that her life - lived at a feverish pace on the fringes of Bloomsbury during the First World War - ended after a prolonged battle with pulmonary disease when she was only thirty-four years old.

While her life was marred by emotional and physical afflictions of the most extreme kind, argues Mary Burgan in Illness, Gender, and Writing, her stories have seemed to exist in isolation from those afflictions - as stylish expressions of the "new," as romantic triumphs of art over tragic circumstances, or as wavering expressions of Mansfield's early feminism.

In the first book to look at the continuum of a writer's life and work in terms of that writer's various illnesses, Burgan explores Katherine Mansfield's recurrent emotional and physical afflictions as the ground of her writing.

Mansfield is remarkably suited to this approach, Burgan contends, because her "illnesses" ranged from such early psychological afflictions as separation anxiety, body image disturbances, and fear of homosexuality to bodily afflictions that included miscarriage and abortion, venereal disease, and tuberculosis. Offering a thorough and provocative reading of Mansfield's major texts, Illness, Gender, and Writing shows how Mansfield negotiated her illnesses and, in so doing, sheds new light on the study of women's creativity.

Mansfield's drive toward self-integration, Burgan concludes, was her strategy for writing - and for staying alive.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. 193-205) and index.
Spine title: Illness, gender & writing.