Modernist Short Fiction and Things

This book reappraises the philosophical value of short fiction by Virginia Woolf, Katherine Mansfield and Elizabeth Bowen, examining the stories through the lens of specific everyday objects. Looking at Woolf and armchairs, Mansfield and snack food, and Bowen and fashion accessories, it probes the aesthetic resonance between these stories’ form and contents and also considers the modes of thinking they might promote. Conceiving of their short fiction as intrinsically radical and experimental even within a wider context of modernist innovation, this book shows how these important women writers brought quotidian objects to riotous life, in such a way that tasked readers with reevaluating their everyday existence. Overall, Modernist Short Fiction and Things argues that short fiction epitomises modernist aesthetics, functioning as a resonant source for investigation and complementing and expanding our understanding of modernist epistemology. 'It offers a suggestive analysis of the ways in which three modernist writers mobilise the thing-like quality of the short story form for an exploration of the uncanniness of the object world. The close readings of Woolf, Mansfield and Bowen are inventive, thoughtful and perceptive.’ - Clare Hanson, Emeritus Professor of English, University of Southampton, UK