Tinakori: Critical Journal of the Katherine Mansfield Society: Home, Space, and Belonging

Home figures as an ambivalent construct in the writing of Katherine Mansfield.
This special issue of Tinakori explores ideas of space and belonging in Mansfield’s work and is the inaugural issue for new editors of the journal, Dr Kym Brindle and Dr Karen D’Souza of Edge Hill University. The essays consider the ways in which aspects of identity in Mansfield’s work are articulated by engagement with both material and emotive notions of home. Questions are asked of the significance ofhom e and conversely of homelessness for Mansfield’s creative imagination. Rosemary Marangoly George stresses that ‘fictionality is an intrinsic attribute of home’, suggesting that ‘home is also the imagined location that can be more readily fixed in a mental landscape than in actual geography’. This issue focuses on intersections between desires for home and the social reality and implications and consequences for domestic space for both men and women. Six essays collectively consider how Mansfield’s stories contextualize debates about identity and space and place. This special issue also features an interview with Professor Kirsty Gunn, Patron of the Katherine Mansfield Society, and internationally acclaimed fiction writer. Her collection of short stories, Infidelities, was awarded the Edge Hill Short Story Prize in 2015.