Aspects of a Minor Literature in Katherine Mansfield’s New Zealand Stories
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18485/analiff.2024.36.1.16Keywords:
Katherine Mansfield, New Zealand stories, minor literature, deterritorialization, onomatopoeia, narrative ruptures, oneirism, children, free indirect discourseAbstract
While Katherine Mansfield spent the most important years of her career – approximately the 1910s – at the centre of the flourishing modernist movement, she still produced several stories which are set in her native New Zealand. Observing Mansfield as an author who was at the time in many ways on the margins of English literature, this paper approaches her New Zealand stories from the theoretical framework offered by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s concept of a ‘minor literature’. Our analysis of eleven short stories identifies those elements that arguably contribute to describing these New Zealand stories as a minor literature. The identified elements, which are illustrated with numerous examples, include onomatopoeic effects of the texts, narrative ruptures/gaps, the intrusion of dreamwork or oneiric states in the narrative discourse, the imagery and perspective of children and animals, and frequent use of (unattributed) free indirect discourse. The combination of these elements deterritorializes the language of Mansfield’s New Zealand stories and endows them with a political and collective value, as well as the revolutionary literary impulse, thus making them a proper example of a minor literature.
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