ESSAY PRIZE COMPETITION #13 2021
The Katherine Mansfield Society is pleased to announce its annual essay
prize competition for 2021, open to all, on the subject of:
Katherine Mansfield’s
The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922)
The winner will receive a cash prize of £200 and the winning essay will be considered for publication in Katherine Mansfield Studies, vol. 14 (2022), the peer-reviewed yearbook of the Katherine Mansfield Society, published by Edinburgh University Press.
The distinguished panel of judges will comprise:
PROFESSOR ELLEKE BOEHMER, FRSL, FRHISTS
Professor of World Literature in English, University of Oxford, UK
Chair of the Judging Panel
PROFESSOR JAY M. DICKSON
Professor of English and Humanities, Reed College, USA
DR CLAIRE DREWERY
Senior Lecturer in English literature, Sheffield Hallam University, UK
Essays that address any aspect of the theme of Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party and Other Stories (1922) are welcome. The full CFP for this volume can be viewed on our website
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 2021
Download PDF of call for paper
A detailed MHRA style guide is available here
PREVIOUS ESSAY COMPETITION WINNER
ESSAY PRIZE COMPETITION #12 (2020)
The co-editors of Katherine Mansfield Studies are pleased to announce that the 2020 Essay Prize for a scholarly essay on the theme of Katherine Mansfield and Childhood has been awarded to Dr Tracy Miao. Her essay, ‘Casting a “haunting light”: Katherine Mansfield’s Modernist Vision of Childhood’ impressed the judges with the illuminating connections it makes between Mansfield’s fiction and Peter Pan, and the subtlety with which it teases out the interplay of Modernist and Edwardian elements in Mansfield’s writing about childhood. Chair of the Judging Panel, Professor Anna Jackson, notes how biographical details are written about with the same assurance and attentiveness that Dr Miao brings to the analysis of scenes from the fiction, not only contributing to our understanding of childhood in Mansfield’s work but also to Modernist and Edwardian concepts of gender, sexuality and romance. Dr Miao is a lecturer in English at Xi’an International Studies University in China where she teaches literature as well as language courses. She has published several essays and book chapters on Katherine Mansfield and has recently contributed an essay on ‘Katherine Mansfield and the East’ to the forthcoming Bloomsbury Handbook to Katherine Mansfield, edited by Todd Martin.
This year’s essay submissions were of such a high standard that very difficult choices had to be made by judges Anna Jackson, Donna Couto, and Gerri Kimber. Also commended were three further essays. ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Play Aesthetics’, by Imola Nagy-Seres, University of Exeter, UK, illuminates the satirical bite of scenes and details of domestic discord in Mansfield’s fiction while casting a new light, too, on the progressiveness of the Montessori method of education which was newly fashionable when Mansfield was writing. Full of beautifully observed detail and sharp comparisons, the essay conveys both Mansfield’s sympathy for children and for childhood creativity, and her sharp eye for social absurdities and adult superficiality. ‘Kezia a “ninseck”, Kezia the Bee’, by Dr Janka Kascakova, Catholic University in Ruzomberok, Slovakia, focuses on the moment in part IX of ‘At the Bay’ when Kezia decides, against the implied rules of the game which is being played, to take on the character of a bee. Following its symbolic connotations, from European folklore as a ‘messenger between the living and the dead’ to classical mythology as a poet-prophet, the close attention this essay gives to Kezia’s ‘ninseck’ places it on a level of importance with the ‘little lamp’ of the doll’s house. Last, but not least, the absorbing and sophisticated essay, ‘Katherine Mansfield’s Sleeping Boys’, by Dr Erika Baldt, Rowan College at Burlington County, USA, explores the aestheticisation of death in the work of Katherine Mansfield in the light of the First World War, drawing detailed, compelling parallels with classical Greek imagery. All four essays will be published along with several others on the theme in Katherine Mansfield Studies, vol. 13, which will appear next year.