Miss Brill
Review of European Studies
December, 2009
A Stylistic Analysis of “Miss Brill” by Katherine Mansfield
Shenli Song College of Foreign Languages, Zhejiang Gongshang University Office of Foreign Language College at Zhejiang Gongshang University Xia Sha City-University-Town, Hangzhou 310018, Zhejiang, China E-mail: windyforever@gmail.com Abstract Katherine Mansfield, remembered as one of the finest writers of English short stories, enjoys enduring fame and a somewhat awesome literary status with her short stories, Miss Brill as one of her representative pieces. The interest of our Chinese critics, in general, locates more in the modernist techniques and devices she employs to present the inner world of the characters in her stories, than in her unique artistry in using language—commonly known as style— as a women writer. This thesis, however, is concerned primarily with the style of “Miss Brill”, and aims to provide an integrative, systematic stylistic analysis of the short story, deriving its underlying theories from a method of prose text analysis, proposed by literary stylists Leech & Short. The analysis is done in three main steps corresponding to the four main "linguistic levels" of a text: lexical levels, grammatically levels, figures of speech, and cohesion and context. Keywords: Style, Lexical feature, Grammatical feature, Rhetorical tool, Fine, Sensitive 1. Introduction Katherine Mansfield, pseudonym of Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp (1888-1923), was born in Wellington, New Zealand. She came and went, across the horizon of our contemporary letters, before we had quite accustomed ourselves to the thought that she belonged to us. She died at the age of 35, in the first flush of her fame, leaving behind a queerly persistent interest for virtually anything she writes, a charm that no critic has been able to fully define. Ever since the day Mansfield was introduced to Chinese readers, our critical world has been littered with numerous essays and theses on her
December, 2009
A Stylistic Analysis of “Miss Brill” by Katherine Mansfield
Shenli Song College of Foreign Languages, Zhejiang Gongshang University Office of Foreign Language College at Zhejiang Gongshang University Xia Sha City-University-Town, Hangzhou 310018, Zhejiang, China E-mail: windyforever@gmail.com Abstract Katherine Mansfield, remembered as one of the finest writers of English short stories, enjoys enduring fame and a somewhat awesome literary status with her short stories, Miss Brill as one of her representative pieces. The interest of our Chinese critics, in general, locates more in the modernist techniques and devices she employs to present the inner world of the characters in her stories, than in her unique artistry in using language—commonly known as style— as a women writer. This thesis, however, is concerned primarily with the style of “Miss Brill”, and aims to provide an integrative, systematic stylistic analysis of the short story, deriving its underlying theories from a method of prose text analysis, proposed by literary stylists Leech & Short. The analysis is done in three main steps corresponding to the four main "linguistic levels" of a text: lexical levels, grammatically levels, figures of speech, and cohesion and context. Keywords: Style, Lexical feature, Grammatical feature, Rhetorical tool, Fine, Sensitive 1. Introduction Katherine Mansfield, pseudonym of Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp (1888-1923), was born in Wellington, New Zealand. She came and went, across the horizon of our contemporary letters, before we had quite accustomed ourselves to the thought that she belonged to us. She died at the age of 35, in the first flush of her fame, leaving behind a queerly persistent interest for virtually anything she writes, a charm that no critic has been able to fully define. Ever since the day Mansfield was introduced to Chinese readers, our critical world has been littered with numerous essays and theses on her
References: Bowen, Elizabeth. (1956). “Introduction” in Stories by Katherine Mansfield. Boston: Vintage Books. Channell, Joanna. (2000). Vague Language. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language and Education Press House. Chiu, Aman & Al. (1998). Dictionary of Contemporary English, 2nd ed. Shanghai: The Commercial Press. Daiches, David. (1996). The Critical Response to Katherine Mansfield. London: Greenwood press. Dan, Shen. (1998). Research on Narrative and Novel Style. Beijing: Peking University Press. Halliday, Michael. (1971). Linguistic Function and Literary Style: an Inquiry into the Language of William Golding’s The Inheritors, in S.Chatman,ed. Literary Style: A Symposium. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. Leech, G. and Short, M. (2001). Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose Foreign Language. Beijing: Teaching and Research Press. Mansfield, Katherine. (1981). The Collected Stories of Katherine Mansfield. London: Penguin Books Ltd. Sewell, Arthur. (1936). Katherine Mansfield—A Critical Essay. New Zealand: Unicorn Press. 2. Leech and Short’s Approach 123