 |
[email protected] |
 |
3275638434 |
 |
 |
| Paper Publishing WeChat |
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Poetry, Ellipsis, and Katherine Mansfield’s “Special Prose”
SHIEH Wen-Shan
Full-Text PDF
XML 1679 Views
DOI:10.17265/2159-5836/2015.03.002
Shih Chien University, Kaohsiung Campus, Taiwan
In this essay, the author proposes to explore Mansfield’s “special prose” by examining the two issues raised in her journal entries: First, the phrase “perhaps not in poetry. No, perhaps in Prose” in her journal entry of 22 January 1916 shows that Mansfield plans to experiment with a kind of poetic prose, or in her own words—“special prose”. The profound affinity between the “special prose” and the notion of elegy, “a mournful poem for the dead” (OED, “elegy”, n. sense 1), calls attention to her work’s decisive but still insufficiently examined relationship to poetry and her preoccupation with mortality. Second, the words “scraps”, “bits”, and “nothing real finished” in her journal entry of 19 February 1918 indicate that the mortal fragility she writes about in her “special prose” is closely bound up with verbal fragility, as embodied, for example, in the form of an ellipsis mark that she uses extensively elsewhere in her short stories. Her connection to poetry and her use of ellipsis marks will be discussed by looking at the impact of John Keats’s poems on her own work and “The Canary” (1922), the last story she completed before her death.
Mansfield, Keats, poetry, “special prose”, ellipsis, mortal fragility
Bennett, A., & Royle, N. (2009). An introduction to literature, criticism and theory (4th ed.). Harlow: Pearson Longman.
Carver, R. (1989). On writing. In Fires: Essays, poems, stories (pp. 22-7). New York: Vintage Contemporaries.
Clark, T. (2005). The poetics of singularity: The counter-culturalist turn in Heidegger, Derrida, Blanchot and the later Gadamer. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Culler, J. (1974). Flaubert: The uses of uncertainty. London: Paul Elek.
Dawson, L. (1997). Wilde as critic and theorist. In P. Raby (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Oscar Wilde (pp. 80-95). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dunbar, P. (1997). Radical Mansfield: Double discourse in Katherine Mansfield’s short stories. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian.
Eliot, T. S. (1974). Collected poems. London: Faber and Faber.
Flaubert, G. (2005). Three tales. London: Penguin.
Keats, J. (1970). The letters of John Keats. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Keats, J. (1978). The poems of John Keats. London: Heinemann Educational Books.
Kimber, G. (2011). Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A centenary volume of essays. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillian.
Mansfield, K. (1930). Novels and novelist. London: Constable.
Mansfield, K. (1977). The letters and journals of Katherine Mansfield: A selection. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Mansfield, K. (1984). The collected letters of Katherine Mansfield. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Mansfield, K. (1987). The collected letters of Katherine Mansfield. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Mansfield, K. (1988). Poems of Katherine Mansfield. Oxford: Oxford University.
Mansfield, K. (1996). The collected letters of Katherine Mansfield. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Mansfield, K. (1997). The Katherine Mansfield notebooks. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Mansfield, K. (2008). The collected letters of Katherine Mansfield. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Mansfield, K. (2012). The Edinburgh edition of the collected works of Katherine Mansfield. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
O’Sullivan, V. (1988). Introduction. In Poems of Katherine Mansfield (pp. 9-13). Oxford: Oxford University.
O’Sullivan, V. (2011). Signing off: Katherine Mansfield’s last year. In Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A centenary volume of essays (pp. 13-27). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Royle, N. (2008). Jacques Derrida. London and New York: Routledge.
Sandley, S. (1994). The middle of thenote: Mansfield’s “Glimpses”. In Katherine Mansfield: In from the margin (pp. 70-89). Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Smith, A. (1999). Katherine Mansfield and Virginia woolf: A public of two. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Smith, A. (2010). Mansfield and Dickens: “I am not reading Dickens idly”. In The Katherine Mansfield society annual birthday lecture (pp. 7-20). Bath: Katherine Mansfield Society Publications.
Stead, C. K. (1977). Introduction. In The letters and journals of Katherine Mansfield: A selection (pp. 9-20). Harmondsworth: Penguin.
The Oxford English Dictionary. (1989). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wikipedia. (n.d.). Animal sentinels. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_sentinel
Woolf, V. (1963). The waves. London: Hogarth.
Woolf, V. (1978).The diary of Virginia Woolf. London: Hogarth.