| dc.description.abstract | The influence of ancient Chinese literature and culture on modernist fiction and poetry is already a well-trodden area of research in modernist criticism. In Orientalism and Modernism (1995), Qian Zhaoming argues that Orientalism constitute Euro-American modernism in the 1910s and 1920s (5). Since Qian made this claim, numerous articles, books and dissertations have reinforced it. Patricia Laurence in her monograph Lily Briscoe’s Chinese Eyes (2003) describes the various English translations of Chinese poetry emerged in this period as “grist to the modernist mill” (205). The essay collection British Modernism and Chinoiserie (2015) edited by Anne Witchard, is a more recent example of a critical study that examines modernism’s fascination with China, while Ezra Pound’s interest in China has always been well-documented. Inspired by this rich body of criticism, I also differ from other critics in that firstly, my research focuses on Katherine Mansfield’s engagement with Chinese elements by situating her in an alternative tradition of British interest in China at the turn of the 20th century; secondly, focusing on those who are not generally considered as central figures of modernism, the research argues that Mansfield, along with her contemporary British writers and artists, discovered in Chinese poetry, art and culture the aesthetic, philosophical and political ideas that help deal with modernist innovations and modernity; thirdly, the British interest in China at that time was a resurgent interest of an earlier European fascination with the country, but with more real contacts and deeper understandings; fourthly, I extend the influence of Chinese elements from Euro-American modernist poetry to short stories; and fifthly, Mansfield’s New Zealand background exposed her to the Chinese since her childhood.
I will trace Mansfield’s engagement with the ancient Chinese elements, giving emphasis to her easy access to Chinese artefacts and paintings displayed at the British Museum in the 1910s; Oscar Wilde’s review of Zhuangzi’s ideas; Herbert Giles and Arthur Waley’s translations of Chinese poetry and books on Chinese literature, philosophy and paintings; Kakuzo Okakura’s The Book of Tea (1906); Bertrand Russell’s account of China; Lytton Strachey’s review of Chinese poems and drama on China, and so on. My dissertation will be divided into three chapters, all of which hone in on particular instances of Mansfield’s debt to China. The topics are “The Pear Tree”, “Tea Drinking”, and “Gardens and Landscapes”. My argument will proceed by linking quotations and events in Mansfield’s stories to ancient Chinese poetry, art and cultural ideas, offering extensive contextual information about these Chinese reference points in her work. My broad aim is to map a relationship between Mansfield’s treatment of Chinese images, rituals, gardens and landscapes, and her representation of ideas of healing. I will argue that she understood mortality, beauty, healing, self-cultivation, relationships, freedom and innovations of the modernist short stories from perspectives inspired by Chinese literature, art and culture. | en_GB |
