New Zealand Centre Supports the Study of Katherine Mansfield at Chinese Universities20/12/2015¯New Zealand Centre Supports the Study of Katherine Mansfield at Chinese Universities.
Since the 1990s the study of the New Zealand short-story writer Katherine Mansfield remains active and productive in the academic circles of foreign literature research in China. Among recent publications on Katherine Mansfield is a monograph The Aesthetic Modernity of Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories published in 2015 by China Social Sciences Press. Its author is Professor Wang Suying of Hebei Normal University, and a visiting scholar in the Department of English, Peking University in the 2012~2013 school year. Her research work was supported by both the New Zealand Centre and the Centre for Oceanian Studies at Peking University.
Translation of Katherine Mansfield by Professor Wang Suying. The book intends to make a comprehensive study of the short stories of Katherine Mansfield from the perspective of aesthetic modernity, and its key contents discuss the relationship between Katherine Mansfield and modernist literature, including the modernist narrative styles, themes, and aesthetic paradigms of her stories. The book also interprets how Mansfield represents some of the particular characteristics of aesthetic modernity through describing the people’s negative moods of trauma, repression, death, anxiety, alienation etc. and the living state of self-division, and the loss of self and materialization in the first two decades of the 20th century, mainly as the result of the World War I. The book is prefaced by Professor Liu Shusen, Director of the New Zealand Centre at Peking University. Professor Liu Shusen first introduces the tradition and status quo of the study on Mansfield’s stories at home and abroad and then analyzes the value and significance of The Aesthetic Modernity of Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories in the context of Asia-Pacific Studies. The preface is intended to help the reader of the book better understand Katherine Mansfield as a literary author who was born and grew up in New Zealand with an intrinsic sense of the national and local identity, which often finds exquisite expression in some of her best short stories. |
