Sociohistorical Criticism On Katherine Mansfield's Six Short Stories With Male Protagonists

As a master of short story writing, Katherine Mansfield is widely considered as a women writer of genius whose prominent status in the history of world literature can never be overlooked. And she has been the only writer whose life and work are inseparable one so far in the literary history. Mansfield had been writing under the shadows of loneliness and death in a whole life. Of all her works, a majority of ones use females as the protagonists, about one third mainly describe the relationship between the man and woman in marriage and a happy, harmonious coexistence is impossible for them to achieve, only a few portraying male images. This thesis has used methods of sociohistorical criticism to make a detailed analysis of Mansfield's six short stories with male protagonists in order to get a comprehensive knowing about the themes, ideological tendency and social impacts these six short stories have. The whole thesis consists of five parts altogether.Chapter One was an introduction including three parts:Mansfield's life and literary creation, literature review and the theory of sociohistorical criticism.Chapter Two mainly introduced the writing background of Katherine Mansfield's six short stories with male protagonists. It was divided into three aspects:the sociohistorical background, the ideological background and the particular circumstances when the six short stories were composed respectively.Chapter Three revealed an authentic reflection of the specific social life at that time by exploring and analyzing their lonely, helpless male figures and depressing, distorted atmosphere. This kind of authentic reflection implied an isolated, distorted nature of human beings in modern society after the First World War.Chapter Four gave some detailed analysis of the tendency and social impact standards of sociohistorical criticism reflected in Mansfield's six short stories having male protagonists. The first part included two aspects:the subversion of Mansfield's independent female images and the subversion of Mansfield's authoritative male images. And the second part concentrated on the social impacts of Mansfield's six short stories with male protagonists. They not only offered a panoramic reflection of the modern westerners'social life after World War One, but also revealed a depressing fact that the modern man was being reduced into some little clumsy animals like spiders and crabs, distorted and alienated, in such a bewildered society of disorder, suspicions and disillusionment. Bedsides, they also helped readers establish right viewpoints of telling the Wong from the Right and of life values and form a regular and healthy way of life.And the last part was conclusions mainly consisting of several summarized important viewpoints gotten from the thesis after all the discussions and analysis, and its main problems that could not be solved in this thesis.