Title: Illness, gender, and writing
First published: 1994
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.
Subjects: Authors, New Zealand, Health and hygiene, History and criticism, Feminism and literature, Feminist fiction, English, Sex role in literature, Psychoanalysis and literature, English Feminist fiction, Criticism and interpretation, New Zealand Authors, Psychological fiction, English, Women authors, Health, Women and literature, Authorship, Sex differences, English Psychological fiction, Body, Human, in literature, History, Psychanalyse et littérature, Maladies dans la littérature, Psychology, Critique et interprétation, Création, Sekseverschillen, Santé et hygiène, Krankheit, Gender Identity, Corps humain dans la littérature, Geschlechterrolle, Écrivains, Art d'écrire, Écrivaines néo-zélandaises, Auteurschap, Féminisme et littérature, Human Body, Santé, Women, Littérature, Ziekte, Rôle selon le sexe dans la littérature, Modern Literature, Différences entre sexes, Frauenliteratur, Histoire, Maladies, Human body in literature, Psychoanalytic Interpretation, Femmes et littérature, Mansfield, katherine, 1888-1923, Authorship, sex differences
Places: New Zealand
People: Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923)
Time periods: 20th century
LC classification: PR9639.3.M258 Z587 1994