The Katherine Mansfield Society is pleased to announce the winner of the annual essay prize competition for 2022 on the subject of
Katherine Mansfield, Illness and Death
The co-editors of the Katherine Mansfield Studies book series are pleased to announce that the 2022 Essay Prize for a scholarly essay on Katherine Mansfield, Illness and Death, has been awarded to Brigitte McCray, associate professor of English at Pellissippi State Community College in Knoxville, Tennessee, U.S. Her winning essay, ‘Towards a Vegan Future’, revisits the time of the First World War within a contemporary perspective in relation to the ideological issue of veganism. The judges for this year’s competition – Professor Angela Smith, Professor Maurizio Ascani, and Dr Janka Kascakova – felt the essay offered a poignant analysis of those years, including the symbiosis between soldiers and animals at the front. Chair of the judging panel, Professor Angela Smith, commented: ‘The discussion of Mansfield’s “vegan sensibility” engages in a lively exchange with a number of critical and historical texts delving into the empathetic quality of Mansfield’s own writing, with a focus on meat consumption, animal suffering and death”.
The judges also highly commended three other essays. One of them, ‘The Spanish Lady Cannot Speak: Katherine Mansfield and “Miasmic Modernism”’, by Jessica Whyte, a PhD student at the University of Sussex, has an innovative critical perspective comparable with that of the winning essay in that it investigates the potential impact that the ‘Spanish flu’ pandemic of 1918–1920 had on modernist fiction through an analysis of Mansfield’s story ‘Revelations’. ‘Restlessness Transformed: Revisiting the Metaphor of Tuberculosis in Katherine Mansfield’s Journals and Letters’ by Hannah Wen-Shan Shieh, Associate Professor in the Department of Applied Foreign Languages at Shih Chien University in Taipei, Taiwan, is a fine essay with a subtle and clearly articulated argument, using critical works on illness and Mansfield’s letters and journals to make the case that her restlessness was not basically a romanticised spiritual quest, but rather a determined search for physical improvement that would enable her to continue to write. ‘Katherine Mansfield, Elizabeth Stanley, and the Song of Songs’, by Erika Baldt, professor at Rowan College at Burlington County, New Jersey, USA, is a nuanced, scholarly essay exploring Mansfield’s reworking of ‘The Song of Songs’ in a series of poems she signed as Elizabeth Stanley and published in The Athenaeum in 1919 under Murry’s editorship. The idea that at a time of deep personal disillusion, due to the worsening of her physical condition and to the ensuing estrangement from her husband, Mansfield may have reverted to the Bible as a source of erotic fulfilment, is in itself moving and engaging.
All four essays will be included in Katherine Mansfield Studies, vol. 15, published by Edinburgh University Press in October 2023.
The Katherine Mansfield Society is pleased to announce its annual essay prize competition for 2022, open to all, on the subject of
Katherine Mansfield, Illness and Death
The winner will receive a cash prize of £200 and the winning essay will be considered for publication in Katherine Mansfield Studies, vol. 15 (2023), the peer-reviewed yearbook of the Katherine Mansfield Society, published by Edinburgh University Press.
The distinguished panel of judges will comprise:
EMERITUS PROFESSOR ANGELA SMITH
University of Stirling, UK
Chair of the Judging Panel
PROFESSOR MAURIZIO ASCARI
University of Bologna, Italy
DR JANKA KASCAKOVA
Catholic University in Ružomberok, Slovakia
Essays that address any aspect of the theme of Katherine Mansfield, Illness and Death are welcome. The full CFP for this volume can be viewed on our website:
https://katherinemansfieldsociety.org/publications/yearbook/
Submissions of between c. 6000 words (inclusive of endnotes), in Word format, Times New Roman 12 point, double-line spaced, using MHRA style referencing with endnotes, should be emailed to the editorial team, accompanied by an abstract, 5 keywords, and 50-word biography: kms@katherinemansfieldsociety.org
Deadline for submissions: 31 August 2022
A detailed MHRA style guide is available from the Katherine Mansfield Society website:
https://katherinemansfieldsociety.org/publications/yearbook/