"on The Kay Mansfield Modernist Characteristics

Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923 ) is one of the prose writers who, along with Virginia Woolf, is the most responsible for calling the twentieth-century reader into being. It is a truism to say that modernist art, which remain the major the most significant art of this era, developed around two major concerns: a radically new sense of human consciousness and a struggle to find a means of literary expression adequate to convey the new ideas about self, time and perception. The interests of the modernist writer called for a new kind of prose-one that devaluated the linear progression of plot, that was attuned to the image and the symbol, that developed mood and voice as locations of meaning, and that foreground a problematic investigation into the status of the individual. In short, the interests of the writers demanded the invention of a prose of which called for poetic reading, and which drew heavily on the traditional devices of poetry for its articulation.Katherine Mansfield transformed the short story in English, and she did so along significantly modernist line. Her innovative writing was especially attuned to presentation of an unfixed and uncertain version personality that was communicated through unifying images and through extraordinarily tight control of narration. Her stories demanded a new kind of reader, and the aesthetic excitement with which her stories were first greeted registered this in a way that has generally been lost simply because the lessons of her writing have been so widely accepted .Katherine Mansfield is one of the major modernists, who , has had nothing like the serious attention that her writing demands. Given the centrality of Katherine Mansfield's work to the shape of modern prose in English it is instructive to the feminist reader to consider the history of her literary reputation. It has exhibited all the signs of a textbook case of the devaluation of woman's writing. The most concise and thoroughly representative summary of how Katherine Mansfield was to be seen already existed before her death.Katherine Mansfield's writings show a profound appreciation of English and continental literary tradition-including the nineteenth-century French and Russian prose realist. From them, as well as from the French Symbolist and English Romantics, she obtained the apparent combination of open-ended and taut structuring and their use of the subjective lyrical voice. The also contributed signally to the invention of the Modernist or literary, short story. She is one of the great Modernist innovators of twentieth-century English literature.