Melinda Harvey

... 170 Melinda Harvey According to Virginia Woolf, a fascination for the first chapter of The Tun-nel tends, more often than not, to ... Jean Radford, Howard Finn and John Mepham have recently seen in the first chapter's “very long, indigestible solid blocks” of detail much more than ...

<p>This chapter extends the theorisation of literary influence beyond arguments put forward by Harold Bloom (around anxiety) and Bonnie Kime Scott (around modernist coteries) by asserting that it is blind to temporal, spatial and cultural boundaries. It argues that revisiting influence as a driver of literary creativity is critical as literary theory seeks once again to situate texts and think about the author. Katherine Mansfield is an apposite study for influence in a variety of registers - including ambivalence, exchange, identification, imitation, enchantment and legacy - because of her rich engagement with her literary predecessors and contemporaries, and the degree to which she impacted inheritors across time and place. </p>

"This special issue of Colloquy is devoted to papers arising from the postgraduate conference, 'Curious Eyes: Sites and Scenes of Modernism,' held at The University of Sydney on 28th September, 1999. The motivation behind this conference was to provide a forum for current innovative and challenging postgraduate work in the field of Modernist Studies, in its literary, social, political, artistic and philosophical contexts. Our aim was to supply a space—a real and discursive 'site and scene', if you like, in which postgraduate students from all over Australia could speak, first and foremost as Modernists—an apt intent given Modernism's association with coterie, the group, the network and the web. In this way, 'Curious Eyes' can be seen in the wider context of the reemergence of Modernist Studies as an active and piquant area of critical dialogue, discussion, debate and disputation. A number of recent phenomenal successes in Modernist Studies gatherings suggest this: in The United States, the newly formed Modernist Studies Association's inaugural 'New Modernisms' conference held at Penn State University in October last year boasted figures of more than five hundred participants. Meanwhile, in New York, The Museum of Modern Art held a major retrospective exhibition entitled 'Modernstarts: People-Places-Things.' Across the Atlantic, in London, The Royal Academy of Art's '1900: Art and the Crossroads' and the Tate Gallery's reassessment of the art of the Bloomsbury Group evince the fact that Modernism is, now more than ever, subject to the curious eyes of commentators everywhere."

This chapter reexamines allegations that Katherine Mansfield copied her story ‘The Child-Who-Was-Tired’ from the Russian writer Anton Chekhov. It argues that Mansfield's copying of Chekhov's story was not an isolated incident but instead part of a continuum, a compositional practice that privileged copying over pure invention. Harvey contends that copying was ‘central to Mansfield’s writing process and, ultimately, artistic and personal vision’, and that her writing practice involved much more ‘notetaking, sketching, drafting and revising’ than John Middleton Murry’s mythologising of Mansfield as a solitary genius has allowed. Harvey identifies three modes of copying – appropriation, translation and emulation – that disrupt conventional linear approaches to understanding influence: a precursor may influence a descendant, rather than the other way around.

HIS SPECIAL SECTION ON BOOK REVIEWING IN AUSTRALIA EMERGES FROM THE symposium Critical Matters: Book Reviewing Now, held at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne on 9 April 2015 and hosted by Monash University’s Centre for the Book. This symposium, the first of its kind ever to take place in Australia, brought together over thirty reviewers, academics, writers, literary editors and publishers to debate a series of ‘provocations’ on topics such as the necessity of negative reviews, the problem with pitching, the anachronistic nature of critical jargon, the pros and cons of ‘clubbishness’, and the advent of online reviewing sites. Like the symposium, this special section consciously refuses two premises: namely that, before we even start to talk about book reviewing itself, we have to defend its right to exist or that it is in a state of crisis. Instead, this special section understands book reviewing to be a dynamic field that has influence beyond itself, and that can and should be treated...

“Welcome to Your New Life” is a highly original memoir that seeks to describe the ambush of the mind by motherhood. Composed in second person and present tense, this is creative non-fiction as a generic hybrid: part comedy, part poem, part meditation, part essay. It moves in and out of two main modes, as it details both the comedy of the body, and the more poetic/philosophical observations of the mind trying to hold on to itself. The book begins as a type of autobiography of the body. The second part of the book examines the subjectivities of motherhood: mother vanity alongside mother love.

This essay seeks to characterise the relationship between two key institutions in the contemporary Australian literary field: book reviews and literary prizes. We find that the relationship between literary prizes and book reviews is one of interdependence and amplification. By “interdependence”, we mean that there is significant movement of agents between the two sectors as well as a mutual influence of the sectors upon each other. By “amplification”, we refer to the fact that attention in one sector often leads to heightened attention in the other. Reviews value many of the same works as prizes—especially in the case of works of fiction—and their value assessments are magnified when those works go on to win prizes. Prizes also implicitly and explicitly evidence responses to reviews. Furthermore, success in prizes usually leads to better review coverage for the author’s subsequent publications.

This chapter contextualises the theme of reading Coetzee’s women within the existing scholarship. It highlights women critics’ contribution to Coetzee scholarship and pays attention to Coetzee’s interest in representations of women and women’s voices throughout his oeuvre. It discusses a variety of themes through which this interest plays out, including violence, agency, sexuality and motherhood, and recognises that the question of women is at the forefront of some of the more lively contestations of, and critical debates about, Coetzee’s writing.

It is perhaps the campus novel's greatest eccentricity that it spends so little time in the classroom. As a matter of fact, many of the reputed classics of the genre - from Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim (1954) to David Lodge's more recent loose tetralogy, Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984), Nice Work (1988) and Thinks (2001) - seem to be suggesting that life's real lessons have nothing whatsoever to do with books, ballpoints and blackboards. The hero of these fictions is usually the truant, not the student - be he a pupil or a teacher. Faculty staff are as likely to be spotted skulking in strip-joints or propping up the end of a bar as pontificating from the podium. Following their lead, learners, likewise, tend to be more interested in the partouse than in Proust. Clashes and meetings of the mind frequently serve as short-cuts to the bedroom. Literary references are more often bandied from writer to reader than from teacher to student. Lived experience, these nov...

Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence seeks to understand influence, a powerful yet mysterious and undertheorised impetus for artistic production, by exploring Katherine Mansfield’s wide net of literary associations. Mansfield’s case proves that influence is careless of chronologies, spatial limits, artistic movements and cultural differences. Expanding upon theories of influence that focus on anxiety and coteries, this book demonstrates that it is as often unconscious as it is conscious, and can register as satire, yearning, copying, homage and resentment. This book maps the ecologies of Mansfield’s influences beyond her modernist and postcolonial contexts, observing that it roams wildly over six centuries, across three continents and beyond cultural and linguistic boundaries. Katherine Mansfield and Literary Influence identifies Mansfield’s involvement in six modes of literary influence - Ambivalence, Exchange, Identification, Imitation, Enchantment and Legacy. In so doing, i...

... Brühl, Lucien 124 Lewis, Wyndham 2–3, 42 'LM'(abbrev of 'Moore, Lesley') see Baker, Ida Lockhart, Bruce 20, 28n 9 London 2–3, 6, 13–14, 17, 21, 25, 27, 83, 115, 118, 122, 128–36 passim, 170, 182, 184–5, 204–5 London Mercury, The 3, 46, 50 López Pérez, Ana Bélen 6, 128 ...

... 170 Melinda Harvey According to Virginia Woolf, a fascination for the first chapter of The Tun-nel tends, more often than not, to ... Jean Radford, Howard Finn and John Mepham have recently seen in the first chapter's “very long, indigestible solid blocks” of detail much more than ...

T ESSAY PRESENTS AND ANALYSES THE INITIAL RESULTS OF A LARGE-SCALE AND comparative quantitative survey of book reviews to draw some conclusions about the current state of Australian book reviewing as a field. We argue that the gender disparity in Australian book reviewing that has been identified by the Stella Count over the past four years needs to be seen in the wider context of changes to the nature and extent of book reviews over time. We compare two key publications across two years, three decades apart: Australian Book Review (ABR) and The Australian in 1985 and 2013.

Chapter 16 Katherine Mansfield's Menagerie Melinda Harvey When I write about ducks I swear I am a white duck with a round eye ... claim that Mansfield's writings can be seen as contribut-ing to an invisible, haphazard and often unnoticed undercurrent in literature through the ...

... 9 In addition, Leo Charney's 1998 book Empty Moments: Cinema, Modernity, and Drift has examined modernism's obsessive attempts to pinion and ... 10 Bronfen's approach is wholly unique, however, in its sustained emphasis on the role of space in Miriam's identity formation ...

... achieve a muted and belated relation of equanimity with her smiling, submissive mother, the idea that, "inspired by loyalty to her mother, Miriam sets out on ... approach, the fact that only one of the six writers considered in the book became a mother in actual fact (and Rhys, on her ...

May Sinclair 1863-1946 Melinda Harvey BACKGROUND May Sinclair—novelist, literary critic, philosopher, biographer, poet, translator, and short-story writer—was born in Rock Ferry, Cheshire, the youngest child and only surviving daugh-ter of Belfast-born Amelia ...

It is perhaps the campus novel's greatest eccentricity that it spends so little time in the classroom. As a matter of fact, many of the reputed classics of the genre - from Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim (1954) to David Lodge's more recent loose tetralogy, Changing Places ( ...

... achieve a muted and belated relation of equanimity with her smiling, submissive mother, the idea that, "inspired by loyalty to her mother, Miriam sets out on ... approach, the fact that only one of the six writers considered in the book became a mother in actual fact (and Rhys, on her ...