An Analysis On Modernistic Art In Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories

Katherine Mansfield, regarded as one of the most famous English short story writers, together with James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, living in her contemporary times, formed part of the literary avant-garde in the second and third decades of the twentieth century, whose works marked the emergence of modernism. Mansfield demonstrated and led new literary techniques and exerted an important influence on the innovation of the short stories in English, and hence was crowned as "the Master of Short Stories". She uses lots of modern writing techniques to carry her themes and characters, so this is the most important feature of her works. In this thesis the techniques of episode, streams of consciousness, symbolism, glimpse, and shifting points of view will be analyzed since it is through the modern techniques that the themes and characters in her stories are manifested.As one of important writers in British at rising period of modernism, Mansfield’s short stories describe the features of modernism fully. Mansfield breaks the traditional formality of short stories. In her stories there are not clear beginning, climax and ending, she shows the inner world of the characters by episodes, fragments, and the most important glimpse. Symbolism is one of the most important features of modernist literature. Mansfield is the master-hand who manages to use symbols to express the characters feelings, to dispose the themes expertly and skillfully. By using the techniques of symbolism, Mansfield creates an atmosphere full of puzzles which will strengthen the themes and move the readers. She can endow almost everything appearing in her stories with different symbolic meanings, such as plants, animals, natural settings and so on. Different from the traditional omniscient and single narrative method, Katherine Mansfield adopts a special way---multiple points of view in some of her works. By this way, readers can get rid of the control of the narrator but put themselves into roles of the characters, and they can make a judgment from different angles of statement by the characters.To sum up, the style of Mansfield’s short stories is unique, distinctive and fresh. She passed away too early that it is a loss to English literature, especially the development of English short stories. Her excessive persistence for novels drained of her life’s strength, just as at the last minute of her life. Her passion for art moved us, and her great work will lead us for presuming higher way for art.