Hot Sparks and Cold Devils: Katherine Mansfield and Modernist Thermodynamics

In the writings of Katherine Mansfield, metaphors of temperature are connected to modernist technique. Her letters and book reviews reveal a tendency to conceive of the difference between established modes of fiction and more experimental works in terms of light and heat. I analyze this correlation and consider the ways in which it applies to Mansfield’s own fiction. Thermal tropes in stories such as “Bliss” and “At the Bay” work towards a “warm modernism,” a modernist strategy that Mansfield perceives as being necessary both for representing reality in a postwar environment, and for staving off the emotional and spiritual dislocation that the war produced.