Cinema and the Imagination in Katherine Mansfields Writing

the long version

In this engaging new study, Maurizio Ascari reassesses Katherine Mansfield's literary career through the critical lens of silent film, showing how the author's imagination developed in a cultural climate which was informed by interart exchanges. In London, Mansfield came in touch not only with avant-garde movements, but with the new medium of cinema, which exerted a deep fascination on her. Cinema helped Mansfield achieve a new form pivoting on impersonality and empathy, and, together with stories in which cinema is openly thematised, she wrote others which reveal a cinematic dimension in terms of narrative techniques. This critical work reassesses Mansfield's texts by contextualising them both within the journals where they first appeared and against the background of contemporary discourses on cinema. While exploring a single case study, "Cinema and the Imagination in Katherine Mansfield's Writing" also discusses the intermedia exchanges in which modernism at large is rooted.