Settler stories: postcolonial short fiction

[Extract] To open with an observation about the modernist short story writer Katherine Mansfield is to undertake the kind of re-reading, re-positioning, and re-framing that the postcolonial perspective often suggests. Each of the writers discussed in this chapter has typically been understood in terms of their contribution to nation al literature or to a literary school or style more broadly. As a case in point, Katherine Mansfield has traditionally been classed as a modernist whose stylistics were informed by her distance from New Zealand and exposure to metropolitan literary experiments, allowing her to exceed the conditions of her colonial upbringing to create universal art. More recently, however, scholars have re-evaluated the effects of her colonial upbringing and subsequent exile on her writing to demonstrate ways in which she might instead be understood as a paradigmatic settler postcolonial writer. To understand these writers and their work in these terms is a gesture toward claiming for them a common set of stylistics informed by their shared postcolonial condition in settler domains