Modernist Magazines Research Seminar – June 12th, Senate House

We warmly welcome you to a talk by Gerri Kimber next Thursday in Senate House, Room 224.  Gerri will be talking about Katherine Mansfield and Rhythm – an abstract of the paper that will be presented and Gerri’s biosketch are included below.  Please join us for this engaging presentation, as well as a glass of wine and lively discussion.  There is no need to book and the seminar is free to attend.

Rhythm magazine is available to view as part of the Modernist Journals Project here:http://library.brown.edu/cds/mjp/render.php?view=mjp_object&id=1159905483482363

If participants would like to do some background reading before the evening, they are invited to look at this issue which features an article about Stanislaw Wyspianski by Floryan Sobieniowski: http://library.brown.edu/cds/mjp/render.php?view=mjp_object&id=1159897880678184

Best wishes,

Aimee, Chris and Natasha

Modernist Magazines Research Seminar

Abstract:

Rhythm, established in the summer of 1911, and which ran for 14 issues until its demise in March 1913, was an avant-garde publication with a bias towards Symbolism, the arts and Post-Impres­sionism, the music of Debussy and Mahler and the philosophy of Bergson. The list of contributors, mostly unknown at the time beyond the confines of the Left Bank in Paris, reads impressively today and included Derain, Picasso, Tristan Derème and Francis Carco.

Co-editors John Middleton Murry and his future wife Katherine Mansfield were well read in foreign literature; Murry had spent time in Paris and made many acquaintances within its artistic community and Mansfield had spent almost a year in Bavaria in 1909, where she had befriended a group of Polish writers. Thus there developed an émigré aspect to the contributors of both journals; Mansfield and Carco were both born and brought up in the south Pacific, and Eastern Europe was also strongly represented, with contributions by Floryan Sobienowski, with whom Mansfield had had a liaison in Bavaria in 1909, and who became the magazine’s ‘Polish correspondent’. In addition Mansfield’s passion for the oriental brought foreign contributors such as Yone Noguchi into the Rhythm stable.

This paper will highlight the extent of the émigré creative input into Rhythm and also consider Mansfield’s own contributions, which frequently took émigré subjects as their theme. This influence would manifest itself throughout the pages of Rhythm and its short-lived reincarnation as the Blue Review. As a result, both little magazines could be described as having a transnational identity, with a plethora of international correspondents publicising the new movement of the avant-garde.

[All copies of Rhythm and the Blue Review are now digitised and can be viewed here:http://library.brown.edu/cds/mjp/journals.html ]

Dr Gerri Kimber is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Northampton. She is co-editor of Katherine Mansfield Studies, the peer-reviewed yearbook of the Katherine Mansfield Society. She is the deviser and Series Editor of the four-volume Collected Works of Katherine Mansfield (2012-15). She is the author of Katherine Mansfield: The Early Years (forthcoming, 2015), Katherine Mansfield: The View from France (2008), and A Literary Modernist: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of the Short Story (2008). She is also co-editor of the following volumes: Katherine Mansfield and Continental Europe: Connections and Influences(forthcoming, 2015), Katherine Mansfield and World War One (forthcoming, 2014), Katherine Mansfield and the (Post)colonial (2013); Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism (2011);Celebrating Katherine Mansfield: A Centenary Volume of Essays (2011); Framed! Essays in French Studies (2007). As well as having published numerous articles, she has contributed chapters in the following books: The Great Adventure Ends: New Zealand and France on the Western Front (2013); Bloomsbury: Inspirations and Influences (2013); Katherine Mansfield and Literary Modernism (2011); Translation and Censorship: Arts of Interference (2008);Companion to the British Short Story and Short Fiction (2007). Gerri is Chair of the International Katherine Mansfield Society and has co-organised numerous international Mansfield conferences and events. In 2014, Gerri was one of three nominees for the title UK New Zealander of the Year, for her services to New Zealand culture.​