On The Stylistic Features Of Katherine Mansfield's Short Stories

Katherine Mansfield( 1888-1923 ) is an eminent figure in the modernist development of the short story in Britain in the 20th century, as well as an innovator who has incorporated the modernist art into short story writing. Her best work excavates the interior world of the characters, casts off traditional plots and endings and infuses the story and endows her writings with the style of poetic prose through her exquisite employment of various symbols and images. In her stories, Mansfield enters the inner world of her characters and reflects their feelings and thoughts, from which we can see the ugliness of the distorted society, the cruelty of the human nature and her love and hatred as an honest writer. As for the experimental innovations of the modern fiction, Mansfield turns a new page of the short story writing in 20th century with her unique, delicate and feminist way of expression, exquisite writing techniques and brand-new artistic style.Despite her premature death, she leaves us about 88 works altogether. Her best and most characteristic works are generally considered to be contained in Bliss and Other Stories and The Garden Party and other stories. So far, due to Mansfield's significant innovations in this literary genre, she and her stories never failed to arouse the interest of literary critics most of whom choose to conduct research from the following aspects: (1) the influence of Mansfield and her works on the genre of the short story;(2) biographical criticism; (3) feminist criticism; (4) psychological criticism. However, the analysis of the stylistic features of her short stories is far from being satisfied. So the author intends to have a relatively comprehensive analysis of the stylistic features of her highly regarded and widely known works from the angle of literary stylistics and narratology. The selected corpus mainly includes: Bliss, The Garden Party, Prelude, At the Bay, Life of Ma Parker, Her First Ball, The Daughters of the Late Colonel and Miss Brill.The current thesis consists of five parts. The first part is a brief introduction to Katherine Mansfield's transformative role in the realm of the short story and the current researches on Mansfield and her works. It also states the author's reason to write the thesis and the general structure of the whole thesis. In chapter one, after a brief survey of her life and her major works, it also probes into the stylistic influences she has assimilated from several literary giants. The second chapter deals with the theoretical background of the thesis, which covers a brief review of literary stylistics and narratology. It also briefly introduces the method of analysis suggested in Leech and Short's Style in Fiction. The third part applies the checklist of stylistic categories (Leech and Short) as the main framework to the study of the stylistic features of Mansfield's short stories, consisting of four categories: lexical features, grammatical features, figure of speech and graphological features. Based on the categories listed above, the corpora can be systematically investigated. Firstly, on lexical level, the author studies the use of Mansfield's preferential words and their stylistic effects. Second, on grammatical level the author discusses the typical sentence types and Mansfield's skillful use of prepositional phrases. Third, metaphor and symbolism are the major traditional stylistic approaches in view of figure of speech. In terms of graphological features, the author points out that Mansfield creates the structure of short story with inconclusive ending through her dexterous employment of dashes and ellipses. According to the complementary feature of narratology and stylistics in analyzing fiction, the fourth chapter studies the narrative structure of the text.The final part comes to the conclusion of this thesis. This paper tries to analyze Mansfield's simple and natural style by focusing on some typical examples extracted from her mature works. Firstly, she prefers to employ colloquial vocabulary, adjectives and hyphenated multi-word phrases; Secondly, she prefers to choose simple sentences, interrogative sentences and exclamatory sentences. When expressing an ongoing action, its continuity and process, Mansfield often favors using prepositional phrases to substitute action verbs. Thirdly, she tends to employ a variety of rhetorical devices such as simile, metaphor, repetition and symbolism, which contribute a lot to revealing the theme, portraying the character and exploring the inner world of the characters. Fourthly, she also shows preference for the use of suspension points and dash, by which she omits plenty of surrounding and character description, giving the readers tremendous space for interpretation. Concerning the narrative strategy, through the dexterous shifts in narrative point of view and interior monologue, she evokes the emotional response from the reader, and brings the reader into the characters psychological states, thus creating empathy.This thesis is a tentative effort to provide objective evidence for the text's aesthetic value through describing and analyzing chosen linguistic features of Mansfield's widely reprinted short stories and their stylistic effects, thus enabling readers to have a better appreciation of the thematic significance and artistic value of the text.