Between Land and Settler Subjectivity: The Modernist Animal’s Territory in Katherine Mansfield’s “Prelude”

Abstract

ABSTRACT:This essay examines animal presence in Katherine Mansfield’s “Prelude,” demonstrating how the text’s aesthetics of animacy—the way different beings in the story undergo creaturely transformations and brim with an uncontainable vitality—cannot be read in isolation from the settler colonial environment of rural New Zealand. In establishing this connection, the essay argues that the dreamlike world of “Prelude” indicates the makings of an emergent settler territory.