A Study On Katherine Mansfield's Modernist Narrative Strategies

Katherine Mansfield is an important figure in modernist movement. And she contributes a lot to the development of modern short story. As an innovator in the development of modern short story, Mansfield aims at cutting her voice from her works and keeping aesthetic distance from them. She believes that a story should show rather than tell. She employs many innovative modernist narrative strategies to perfect her works and regards"detached narration"as the artistic ideal.Detached narration is a core feature of modernist literary works. In the traditional works, the author knows everything and guides the reader by his authorial voice. Modernist writers discard the old way. Instead, they keep aesthetic distance from their works, cut the authorial voice, and let the reader understand the works freely, instead of guiding them to read.Detached narration can be reflected in Mansfield's works. This thesis chooses some of her successful works for textual analysis, including The Swing of the Pendulum, The Wind Blows, Prelude, Miss Brill, The Daughters of the Late Colonel, An Ideal Family, and Late at Night.Based on the theory of narratology, this thesis chooses detached narration as the angle of the research. It discusses the innovative narrative strategies Mansfield employs in her stories, including focalization strategies, manipulation of narrative time and consciousness description strategies, in order to study detached narration and the artistic effects it produces in Mansfield's stories. Besides Introduction and Conclusion, the body of the thesis is composed of three chapters.In Introduction, firstly, the life and works of Mansfield are introduced. And secondly, her contribution to modern short story is discussed. And then a literature review follows. At last, a brief introduction to narratology is made.Chapter one is a study of focalization strategies in Mansfield's stories. The first section of this chapter is the theoretical background of focalization. Then the following three sections study respectively internal focalization, double focalization and multi-personal focalization in Mansfield's stories and the specific literary effects Mansfield produces by using the three kinds of focalization strategies. Mansfield employs internal focalization to present the inner thoughts and feelings of the characters vividly, and she uses double focalization to carry the characters'inner feelings or other suggestive meanings impliedly, and she uses multi-personal focalization to render the inner feelings of almost every character in some of her works.The second chapter studies Mansfield's skillful manipulation of narrative time. This chapter discusses the strategies Mansfield often uses to handle narrative time, namely, fragmentary narrative structure and circumlocution. It chooses Prelude and The Daughters of the Late Colonel as the examples and studies how Mansfield has the themes of her stories highlighted and achieves specific artistic effects by the two strategies respectively. Fragmentary narrative structure adopted in Prelude suggests the fragments of women's life cycle and the spiritual fragmentation of women. And circumlocution in The Daughters of the Late Colonel implies the chaos of the mental states of the sisters.Chapter three discusses Mansfield's consciousness description strategies. The consciousness description strategies Mansfield often uses in her stories include stream of consciousness, interior monologue, and dreams and sub-consciousness. This chapter chooses several stories of Mansfield's as the texts of research, including The Swing of the Pendulum, The Wind Blows, Prelude, An Ideal Family, and Late at Night, to study the consciousness description strategies Mansfield employs to show the inner world of her characters directly or impliedly. By consciousness description strategies, Mansfield lets her characters express themselves and brings the reader face to face with them without any interruptive authorial voice.Then it comes to a conclusion that the most significant feature of Mansfield's stories is her narrative strategy. She tries to show her characters and the themes of the stories unobtrusively by detached narration. Her diligence to realize the artistic ideal gives evidence of her innovative role in modernist movement.