A Narratological Study Of Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories

The British female writer Katherine Mansfield has made an outstanding contribution to the development of English novels. With her keen power of observation, exquisite structure, beautiful style, undemonstrative narrative techniques and desalination in plot processing, Mansfield is unique in narration. The plot of Mansfield’s works is presented in the form of fragments, but the characters’ inner world is completely revealed. Based on the interpretation of Mansfield’s short stories, and with related narratological theories, this thesis centers on the aspects of narrative communication, time-space processing techniques and narrative focalization to analyze the image portraying and theme revealing of Mansfield’s short stories.This thesis consists of five chapters. Chapter one is the introduction, mainly including Mansfield’s personal life, her style origin, writing style, the position in literary history and researches about Mansfield’s short stories at home and abroad.Chapter Two focuses on the narrative communication of Mansfield’s short stories. Through the detailed analysis of multiple narrative communications and the application of unreliable narration used in Mansfield’s short stories, the characters’ inner worlds are fully exposed.Chapter Three analyzes Mansfield’s space-time processing techniques. Through the analysis of the flexible shifting in time and space, the artistic skill of Mansfield’s short stories is completely revealed.Chapter Four discusses focalization used in Mansfield’s short stories. It analyzes the functions of Mansfield’s focalization techniques in reveling the characters’ inner world and expressing the theme.Chapter Five concludes with the contributions and limitations of this research, providing references for the future study on the narrative aspects of Mansfield’s works.