A Language for her Garden: Affect, Landscaping and the Language of the Nation in Katherine Manfield’s The Urewera Notebook

As Russo’s essay demonstrates, Mansfield’s ‘construction’ of New Zealand’s pictorial imagery and her struggle to master the lexical expansion of New Zealand English regarding flora, fauna and toponymy reveals an attitudinal involvement in lexical choices which is arguably due to Mansfield’s affective investment in the imaginary ownership of New Zealand’s place and customs. Mansfield’s modernist experimentations in language were conditioned by her deep awareness of the ‘non-natural status’ of British English, a language that did not quite fit its new surroundings, and by the desire to construct a literary language which could respond both to her migrant condition and to New Zealand’s national independence and incipient anti-colonial sentiments.