This special issue of Katherine Mansfield Studies is in remembrance of the centenary of one of the most significant events of the modernist period. Like the reclamation of women’s war
writings that we have already seen in relation to Virginia Woolf and others, Mansfield’s literary response to the key political event of her time is fundamental to our understanding of her
developing writerly style. It is in her responses to the war that we find a ’political Mansfield’, and the articles in this volume provide us with a greater appreciation of Mansfield in her
socio-historical context. In offering new readings of Mansfield’s explicit and implicit war stories, the contributions to this volume refine and extend our knowledge of particular stories and
their genealogy. They illuminate the specific and more general influences of the war on Mansfield’s evolving technique and, jointly, they reveal the importance of the war on her literary
language, as well as for her own particular brand of modernism. This volume helps develop our ideas of what constitute war writings and, in so doing, expands the scope of Mansfield scholarship
and the field of First World War studies.
