The Postcolonial Short Story: Katherine Mansfield and Jean Rhys

Abstract

As a literary genre, the short story have often received less critical recognition in comparison with other narratives , most prominently, the novel. Insights offered both by critics and practitioners of the short story have often emphasized the genre´s peripheral nature, which Frank O’Connor famously encapsulated as the expression of “submerged population groups” in his seminal work “The Lonely Voice” (1962). However, more recent critical approaches to the short story have emphasized the genre’s connection with aesthetic and formal innovation due to its brevity and freedom from conventions: such is the case of Dominic Head’s groundbreaking study “The Modernist Short Story” (1992), where he convincingly argues that modernist authors explored new approaches to fiction in their short stories, whose innovations predated techniques to be found later in their novels. Prominent examples of this are Virginia Woolf’s “Monday or Tuesday” (1921) or James Joyce “Dubliners” (1914). This dissertation departs from this premise, aiming to examine the various ways in which the twentieth-century short story is a genre “particularly suited to the representation of liminal or problematized identities”, as speaking “directly to and about those whose sense of self, religion, state or nation is insecure” (Hunter 2007). This consideration has served as a vehicle for minority groups to correlate their marginal identities with different themes that were not being taken into account in mainstream culture. Taking Hunter’s assessment of the short story as particularly suited to problematized liminal identities, along with Head’s consideration of the genre as especially apt for innovative approaches to fiction, this dissertation will explore what may be called the “postcolonial short story” by focusing on the short narratives of two postcolonial women writers: Katherine Mansfield and Jean Rhys, respectively. Both of them were born in English colonies -Mansfield in New Zealand and Rhys in Dominica- and both encapsulate in their short stories concerns pertaining to their “peripheral” nature, gender and identity