Materiality in Modernist Short Fiction provides a fresh approach to reading material things in modern fiction, accounting for the interplay of the material and the cultural. This volume investigates how Djuna Barnes, Katherine Mansfield, and Jean Rhys use the short story form to evoke the material world as both living and lived, and how the spaces they create for challenging gendered social norms can also be nonanthropocentric spaces for encounters between the human and the nonhuman. Using the unique knowledge created by literary works to spark new conversations between phenomenology, cognitive studies, and new materialisms, complemented with a feminist perspective, this book explores how literature can touch the basic experience of being in, feeling and making sense of a material world that is itself alive and active. From a sensitive reading of how three women used the material world to make their readers see, feel, and question the norms shaping our experience, this volume draws a theory of reading affective materiality that illuminates modernism and the short story form but also reaches beyond them

AcknowledgementsList of FiguresList of Abbreviations1. IntroductionReading Things, Senses, and MeaningsIntricate Things on the Page: the Modernist Short Fiction of Djuna Barnes, Katherine Mansfield, and Jean Rhys2. Powerful ThingsIronical Spirits and Living Mannequins: Jean Rhys, Magic, and SurrealismDolls, Boots, and Madames: Djuna Barnes Rewrites Fetishism3. Lively ThingsDjuna Barnes’s Piled-up and Entangled AssemblagesKatherine Mansfield Writing a Nonhuman Life4. Touching ThingsNice Things: Materiality and Positive affect in Katherine Mansfield’s and Jean Rhys’s StoriesThe Affective Journeys of Djuna Barnes’s and Katherine Mansfield’s Stories5. Making Sense of ThingsMasses and Vividnesses: the Aesthetics and Ethics of The Left BankAt the Indifferent Bay: Nonhuman Perspectives and Meaning in Katherine Mansfield’s StoriesDjuna Barnes’s Detail and the Materiality of the Symbolic6. Conclusion: Reading Affective Materiality