The Fly (online text)

by Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield revolutionized the 20th Century English short story. Her best work shakes itself free of plots and endings and gives the story, for the first time, the expansiveness of the interior life, the poetry of feeling, the blurred edges of personality.

She is taught worldwide because of her historical importance but also because her prose offers lessons in entering ordinary lives that are still vivid and strong.

And her fiction retains its relevance through its open-endedness—its ability to raise discomforting questions about identity, belonging and desire.

Excerpts from

http://www.nzedge.com/heroes/mansfield.html

Modernism

Make It New

The outbreak of war in 1914 is commonly seen as the key event in the development of modernism, marking the end of the civilised ‘contract’ under which life had been lived. The old certainties of religious faith, sexual propriety and social stability seemed less authoritative, just as the artistic means of representing these aspects of society were changing. While the break is not so complete nor the timing quite so neat—there were movements across society and the arts prior to World War 1 which contributed to these changes—the War shook the European sensibility completely.