“Pursued by time” : the chronolibidinal aesthetics of Katherine Mansfield

Abstract

Despite the ever-growing body of scholarship on the short stories of Katherine Mansfield, her treatment of temporal experience has not been sufficiently explored, possibly because, as a woman writer, she is considered to have been most concerned with describing feminine experiences unbound from a so-called “masculine” concern with temporality. However, a new reading of her fiction which draws attention to her practice of chronolibidinal aesthetics highlights the significance of the human experience of exposure to the radical temporality of life as a motif in her fiction, making possible a renewed understanding of Mansfield as a modernist writer of time.