A Study Of Narrative Features In Katherine Mansfield's Short Stories

Mansfield is one of the most brilliant novelists in the early 20 th century. Her unique and original narrative style catches the eyes of readers from home and abroad and wins high praises from the critics. Some scholars have already done much research on the works from the perspective of narratology. But the research mainly focuses on the classic works, paying less attention to some other outstanding works. This thesis adopts the classical narratology as the theoretical basis and twelve short stories by Mansfield as research materials. This thesis makes an attempt at analyzing its narrative features from three aspects—narrative perspective, modes of speech and narrative time. It is hoped to explore the integration of narrative features and themes.This thesis consists of three parts. The first part is the introduction, which sketches out the research background, research purpose and research significance. The second part is the main body, which is further divided into four chapters. The first chapter is literature review, which respectively introduces the research trends about Mansfield's works from home and abroad and explains the theoretical basis of this thesis—narratology. The remaining three chapters are the main parts of this thesis, which carry on deep research on the works from three aspects. The last part is the conclusion, which summarizes the main research findings of the thesis. There are three main findings. First, the flexibly use of different narrative perspectives is one of the narrative features. By using different kinds of narrative perspectives in different creation periods, the development of Mansfield's creation style, better showing inner world of characters and deepening the theme is reflected. Second, various modes of speech play a crucial role in revealing the theme and the characters' psychological dynamics, which embodies Mansfield's highly skilled narrative technique as well. Third, by analyzing the inconsistency between the pseudo-time of the narrative and story time, the overall organization is accurately grasped. Meanwhile, the special meaning of the involved event can be detected by the length of discourse endowed by the narrator. This thesis will also provide a new perspective for the research of English modernism and new development of narratology, by studying of the narrative technique in Mansfield's short stories.