ENTREVISTA: Deconstructing Katherine Mansfield: an interview with Vincent O’Sullivan

Abstract

La presente entrevista con Vincent O’Sullivan, uno de los críticos más distinguidos en estudios sobre Katherine Mansfield y escritor reconocido, tuvo lugar en Wellington, Nueva Zealand, durante el verano de 2002, con posteriores modificaciones por e-mail. El editor de The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield discute aspectos centrales en la narrativa de esta autora, tales como su alcance literario, su relación con el relato corto, su ambigüedad sexual, el distanciamiento entre ella como autora y los personajes que crea, su peculiar modernismo distinto del canónico masculino, el papel de los niños y la autobiografía en su narrativa y sus principales logros y defectos como escritora. El resultado es una imagen subversiva de Mansfield que contrasta con el mito purificador cuidadosamente elaborado por su esposo John Middleton Murry tras la muerte de Mansfield en 1923. Held in Wellington, New Zealand, during the summer of 2002 and subsequently upgraded via email, this is an interview with one of the most reputable scholars in Katherine Mansfield studies, Prof. Vincent O’Sullivan, a prolific and respectable writer himself. The editor of Mansfield’s Collected Letters discusses key issues in Mansfield’s fiction, such as her literary status, her connection with the short story genre, her sexual ambiguity, the breach between herself and the fictional characters that she creates, her distinctive modernism as detached from the male canon, the role of children and autobiography in her narrative, and her main achievements and flaws as a writer. The result is a subversive image of Mansfield, opposed to the purifying myth craftily designed by her husband John Middleton Murry after her death in 1923.